Adnan Syed - Serial / Undisclosed

Well, Quillette have an article out arguing that Syed was wrongfully exonerated and pointed out the weird legal situation in which he is free and the prosecution are no longer interested in him, while at the same time the courts have reinstated the murder conviction.

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For me, this is pretty much what makes it case closed:

Jenn said that in mid-January, possibly the 13th, she had hung out with Jay in the afternoon smoking dope and playing video games with her brother (like many of the teenage witnesses in this case, Jenn was a regular marijuana smoker). She later received a page from an unknown number. When she called back, someone besides Jay answered and said Jay was busy and would return her call when he was ready to be picked up. Jay later paged Jenn, asking her to meet him at Westview Mall. When she drove out to the mall on the evening of the 13th, Adnan and Jay arrived in a car Jenn did not recognize, driven by Adnan. Soon after Jay got into Jenn’s car, he told her that Adnan had strangled Hae. Jay told Jenn that he had then gone with Adnan to Leakin Park, where he had watched Adnan bury Hae’s body. Jay urged Jenn to say nothing about this. She then drove to a dumpster behind Westview Mall and watched Jay throw one (or possibly two) shovels into it. They later returned to Westview so Jay could check there were no prints left on them.

Detectives now knew two crucial facts. First, Jenn knew how Hae had been killed, something she could not have learned from reading media reports of the investigation. Second, Jay was deeply involved in Hae’s disappearance. Jenn told detectives that after she had spoken to them on February 26th, she had called Jay. Jay told her to tell the detectives the truth, then send them to interview him. The detectives lost no time, accosting Jay at 11.30pm on February 27th at his workplace, an adult video store. Jay agreed to talk to police without a lawyer, and in the recorded part of this interview, he told detectives the first of several versions of what happened on January 13th. (The first three of these accounts are compared in a graphic on the Serial website.)

In his first version, recited in the early morning hours of February 28th, Jay told police that Adnan had called him at 10.45am on the morning of the day Hae disappeared. He offered to let Jay use his car and phone while Adnan was at school. For most of the afternoon, Jay hung out with Jenn playing video games and smoking marijuana. At 3.45pm, Adnan called and asked Jay to meet him at Edmonson Avenue in Baltimore. Jay arrived to find Adnan with Hae’s car. Adnan popped the trunk and showed Jay Hae’s body. Adnan and Jay then drove in separate cars to a nearby “Park and Ride” lot near highway I-70, where they left Hae’s car. Jay then dropped Adnan off at Woodlawn for track practice (around 4.30pm) and picked him up again afterward. They went to eat at a McDonald’s, where a cop called Adnan. The pair then collected a pick and shovel from Jay’s grandmother’s house and drove to where they had left Hae’s car near I-70.

With Adnan driving Hae’s car and Jay driving Adnan’s car, they drove to Leakin Park, where Adnan buried Hae. Jay accurately identified the clothes Hae had been wearing when she left school. This was important: Jay was no longer a Woodlawn student, so he would not have had the chance to see Hae leave that day. Jay (in Adnan’s car) and Adnan (in Hae’s car) then drove around looking for a place to dump Hae’s car. After some false starts, Adnan decided on a vacant lot surrounded by rowhouses. Detectives asked Jay where this lot was. He could not recall an address, but said (22p): “It’s like … in the back of a bunch of row homes on like a parking lot … on the west side of Baltimore city.” Detectives asked Jay to ride with them and show them Hae’s car right then, in the early hours of February 28th. Jay led them to a vacant lot near 300 Edgewood Street in Baltimore, where police secured Hae’s 1998 Nissan Sentra.
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Clearly Jay and Jenn knew what had happened. Either that meant that one or both were responsible or it was Adnan. Adnan seems the most likely.

The people who support Adnan seem to have a number of bad faith arguments that sound almost like vaguely asserting it may have been "some Peurto Rican guy". Or working very hard to amplify any doubts.

But ultimately they have no idea who else could have done it, and apparently don't care. This smacks of bad faith in the same way anyone who wanted O.J Simpson to get off has no interest in looking for the real perpetrators. They know full well who the actual killer is but don't want to answer that question.
 
I still want to know why it is that those resting on the judgment of "better authorities than you or I [sic]" who apparently invested a lot of their time listening to Serial and maybe even more pro-Syed podcasts and documentaries, are suddenly aggressively incurious. Not only do they apparently seem completely satisifed now that Adnan Syed is released, but they don't care one bit who the real murderer may be.

Maybe it was that guy who found him because, you know the polygraph thing, or maybe it was Don, which would make sense because the police could have framed the Muslim guy to protect a white guy, or maybe it was some other Muslim guy that the police were presumably protecting because....I dunno... look it's not important! All that is important is to inject doubt into the proceedings. Look at me! The true skeptic! Now watch me bury my head in the sand and demand everyone else does the same.
 
Speaking of libel laws, I would assume it could be considered defamatory to accuse an "innocent man" of murder, right?

But the writer of the Quilette piece is doing just that...

His friend Jay Wilds helped him bury Hae's body in Leakin Park, as confirmed by cell phone records which (unlike what you may have heard) are reliable. Jay and his friend Jenn P. chose to voluntarily confess their involvement to police.

They did so without knowing whether Adnan had given police an alibi. If he had, Jay would have been charged with murder and Jenn, at a minimum, with being an accessory after the fact. They literally staked their futures on their knowledge that Adnan was guilty.

Jay led detectives to the place where he had seen Adnan park Hae's car after the burial, which corroborates Jay's testimony and rules out any version of the crime with a third party -- unless that third party collaborated with Jay in killing Hae for some unknown reason.

Adnan has never provided an alibi for the crucial time window and never will. At first, he offered 80 alibi witnesses from the school and the mosque, but none of them testified at his trial except his father, and then only hesitantly.

In fact, Adnan *knew* he had no alibi, which is why, according to his own sworn testimony, he urged his own lawyer to try to get a plea bargain from prosecutors, a fact skimmed over or ignored in all partisan documentaries about the case.

You read that right: Despite promising 80 alibi witness *and* having both of Asia's letters since March 1999, Adnan, facing trial in December 1999, was willing to accept decades in prison for a crime he now claims he didn't commit.

he partisan podcasts and media coverage of the case have convinced millions that the evidence against Adnan was "shaky" & and that someone else may have killed Hae. There is no basis for either belief. It's a textbook case of partisan journalism distorting the truth.

Around the world, millions of people have been convinced that police are hunting for "alternate suspects". They aren't. Nobody else will ever be charged for Hae's murder, period. The reason is that the evidence against Adnan was compelling.
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Link

So... is Adnan Syed going to start suing people who assert that he was the murderer? Is he bollocks.

Come on, Syed fans. Just admit it. You'll feel better and the cognitive dissonance will dissipate. Syed was the murderer, wasn't he! It should have been pretty obvious even while listening to Serial. I think that even Sarah Koenig knows that Adnan did it.
 
angrysoba said:
Well, Quillette have an article out arguing that Syed was wrongfully exonerated and pointed out the weird legal situation in which he is free and the prosecution are no longer interested in him, while at the same time the courts have reinstated the murder conviction.

Link
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The whole issue with the reinstatement of the conviction is a procedural one. The courts should have notified the next of kin of the victim that the conviction was being quashed ahead of time and they didn't. So it had to be temporarily reinstated to allow the courts notify the next of kin and then re-vacate it. The conviction will be gone at the next hearing.

I'm not reading the quillette article, not giving a hate group internet traffic.
 
Andrew Hammel's long form article

Andrew Hammel wrote, "First, Jay must have recognized Hae’s nondescript car parked among other similar cars as he drove by a random vacant lot. Then, he did not tell anyone, even after Hae’s body was found and the car was advertised as key evidence in a murder case. This silence not only hindered a murder investigation of someone Jay knew, it also cost him thousands of dollars. An American organisation called “Crime Stoppers” rewards tipsters who help solve crimes. It’s all anonymous: Crime Stoppers keeps no records and pays tipsters with untraceable cash. So why would Jay, a poor kid who worked minimum-wage jobs, pass up a risk-free, tax-free windfall?"

From a discussion elsewhere, I was under the impression that Jay probably received about $3000 from crime stoppers, but that discussion board has gone defunct.

"An even less plausible explanation for Jay’s knowledge is a police conspiracy, which would have had to unfold something like this: Cops found Hae’s car at some point and simply left it there. Off the record, they told Jay where the car was, then ordered him to pretend that he was giving this information to the police rather than vice versa when they restarted the recording. According to this theory, Jay may either be the real killer (intent on framing Adnan) or he knew nothing about the crime at all. But why would police leave a car full of evidence in a murder case sitting in an unsecured vacant lot, where it might be stolen or vandalized? Presumably to protect the “real” killer and pin the blame on Adnan. But who was that killer, and why would police want to protect him (or her)?"

The above paragraph makes some fair points, and I agree that the DNA on the shoes was not very probative. Overall, Mr. Hammel provides a cogent and detailed article. Yet it might have been even a better one if it had explained to those of us in the cheap seats why a scenario in which Jay killed Hae without Adnan is "logically impossible." I am also unclear on what caused Jay to flip. In addition, Mr. Hammel seems not at all bothered when the police make a deal with one criminal in order to pursue another criminal who may be no more or even less culpable than the first one. Offhand the only example I can provide is the Richard Glossip case, in which the man who bludgeoned Mr. Van Treese to death ended up with a lighter sentence than Mr. Glossip, who might well have been an accessory after the fact.
 
Chris_Halkides said:
Andrew Hammel wrote, "First, Jay must have recognized Hae’s nondescript car parked among other similar cars as he drove by a random vacant lot. Then, he did not tell anyone, even after Hae’s body was found and the car was advertised as key evidence in a murder case. This silence not only hindered a murder investigation of someone Jay knew, it also cost him thousands of dollars. An American organisation called “Crime Stoppers” rewards tipsters who help solve crimes. It’s all anonymous: Crime Stoppers keeps no records and pays tipsters with untraceable cash. So why would Jay, a poor kid who worked minimum-wage jobs, pass up a risk-free, tax-free windfall?"

From a discussion elsewhere, I was under the impression that Jay probably received about $3000 from crime stoppers, but that discussion board has gone defunct.

"An even less plausible explanation for Jay’s knowledge is a police conspiracy, which would have had to unfold something like this: Cops found Hae’s car at some point and simply left it there. Off the record, they told Jay where the car was, then ordered him to pretend that he was giving this information to the police rather than vice versa when they restarted the recording. According to this theory, Jay may either be the real killer (intent on framing Adnan) or he knew nothing about the crime at all. But why would police leave a car full of evidence in a murder case sitting in an unsecured vacant lot, where it might be stolen or vandalized? Presumably to protect the “real” killer and pin the blame on Adnan. But who was that killer, and why would police want to protect him (or her)?"

The above paragraph makes some fair points, and I agree that the DNA on the shoes was not very probative. Overall, Mr. Hammel provides a cogent and detailed article. Yet it might have been even a better one if it had explained to those of us in the cheap seats why a scenario in which Jay killed Hae without Adnan is "logically impossible." I am also unclear on what caused Jay to flip. In addition, Mr. Hammel seems not at all bothered when the police make a deal with one criminal in order to pursue another criminal who may be no more or even less culpable than the first one. Offhand the only example I can provide is the Richard Glossip case, in which the man who bludgeoned Mr. Van Treese to death ended up with a lighter sentence than Mr. Glossip, who might well have been an accessory after the fact.
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From even cheaper seats I recall being persuaded that Adnan Syed could not have done the crime, from a variety of material.
The comparison to Glossip is interesting, but with the proviso. Sneed had a propensity for tall tales, and Glossip was in crying wolf mode. There was a body inside while he helped repair a window from outside.
I hope there is sense somewhere in my post.
In other words, an accessory must know there is a crime preceding.
 
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Gulliver Foyle said:
The whole issue with the reinstatement of the conviction is a procedural one. The courts should have notified the next of kin of the victim that the conviction was being quashed ahead of time and they didn't. So it had to be temporarily reinstated to allow the courts notify the next of kin and then re-vacate it. The conviction will be gone at the next hearing.

I'm not reading the quillette article, not giving a hate group internet traffic.
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It makes a change from them whining about "woke" Beethoven.
 
Chris_Halkides said:
Andrew Hammel wrote, <snip>

"An even less plausible explanation for Jay’s knowledge is a police conspiracy, which would have had to unfold something like this: Cops found Hae’s car at some point and simply left it there. Off the record, they told Jay where the car was, then ordered him to pretend that he was giving this information to the police rather than vice versa when they restarted the recording. According to this theory, Jay may either be the real killer (intent on framing Adnan) or he knew nothing about the crime at all. But why would police leave a car full of evidence in a murder case sitting in an unsecured vacant lot, where it might be stolen or vandalized? Presumably to protect the “real” killer and pin the blame on Adnan. But who was that killer, and why would police want to protect him (or her)?"

The above paragraph makes some fair points, and I agree that the DNA on the shoes was not very probative. Overall, Mr. Hammel provides a cogent and detailed article. Yet it might have been even a better one if it had explained to those of us in the cheap seats why a scenario in which Jay killed Hae without Adnan is "logically impossible." I am also unclear on what caused Jay to flip. In addition, Mr. Hammel seems not at all bothered when the police make a deal with one criminal in order to pursue another criminal who may be no more or even less culpable than the first one. Offhand the only example I can provide is the Richard Glossip case, in which the man who bludgeoned Mr. Van Treese to death ended up with a lighter sentence than Mr. Glossip, who might well have been an accessory after the fact.
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The cops really didn’t know where the car was located, as they were petitioning for helicopters to aid in the search per the MPIA.

What caused Jay to flip was the police received Adnan’s cell phone records showing calls to Pusateri’s residence (by Jay - Jenn was Jay’s friend) on the day Hae went missing. They showed up at Jenn’s looking for information. Jenn obtained a lawyer and went to the station and told them all she knew, which led them to Jay.
 
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