Adnan Syed - Serial / Undisclosed

Working from memory, science and logistics preclude guilt.
As I contend, American Justice is corrective where British Empire justice fails.
 
Framing the guilty?

I don't know this case as well as I should, but I wonder whether this is an instance of framing the guilty. If I could wave a magic wand, there are others whom I would have released before Mr. Syed.
 
You're not actually supposed to frame the guilty either though, and if someone has been framed and there isn't evidence to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt, then they should be freed.
 
Rolfe said:
You're not actually supposed to frame the guilty either though, and if someone has been framed and there isn't evidence to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt, then they should be freed.
Click to expand...

I wholeheartedly agree. But in a world of limited resources and limited attention, Adnan Syed wouldn't be my top priority.
 
It's an interesting point. I've noticed for years that the vociferous activists attach themselves to cases where they are certain the convicted person is innocent. Campaigns to highlight blatant miscarriages of justice where there is still perhaps room for the person to have committed the crime are far less common.

Human nature I suppose.
 
Wow! Quite a surprise.

So...

Ruling that the state violated its legal obligation to share exculpatory evidence with Syed’s defense, the circuit court judge, Melissa Phinn, ordered Syed placed on home detention with GPS monitoring. Phinn also gave the state 30 days to decide whether to seek a new trial or dismiss the case.
Click to expand...

Link

It will be interesting to see whether or not there will be another trial of Syed, though it sounds as though there will not be unless there is fresh evidence that was not brought up the first time such as improved DNA analysis. That said, I thought there had been a recent DNA analysis that turned up inconclusive.
 
I think at some point society has to step up to the plate and say, no, better 100 guilty men go free (because there wasn't enough evidence to prove guilt BRD) than one innocent man is convicted because someone decided to railroad them.

This implies the necessity for letting a possibly or even probably guilty person free if there isn't enough evidence, and especially if someone decided to railroad them.
 
Rolfe said:
I think at some point society has to step up to the plate and say, no, better 100 guilty men go free (because there wasn't enough evidence to prove guilt BRD) than one innocent man is convicted because someone decided to railroad them.

This implies the necessity for letting a possibly or even probably guilty person free if there isn't enough evidence, and especially if someone decided to railroad them.
Click to expand...

Now all we need is some sort of adjudicated process for determining when the evidence is insufficient or the accused is being railroaded...
 
Rolfe said:
I think at some point society has to step up to the plate and say, no, better 100 guilty men go free (because there wasn't enough evidence to prove guilt BRD) than one innocent man is convicted because someone decided to railroad them.

This implies the necessity for letting a possibly or even probably guilty person free if there isn't enough evidence, and especially if someone decided to railroad them.
Click to expand...
Yes indeed.
I became convinced he is innocent from IA forum and the netflix series.
And really just one Steven Avery to scare the horses.
 
Map with palm print

Rolfe said:
You're not actually supposed to frame the guilty either though, and if someone has been framed and there isn't evidence to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt, then they should be freed.
Click to expand...
Obviously, I agree. With respect to Adnan Sayed there is some evidence against him. For example there is a map with his palm print. At EvidenceProfBlog, the author quoted Serial: "The defense argued, ‘well, you can’t put a timestamp on fingerprints, they could’ve been six week-old fingerprints or six month-old fingerprints, there’s no way to tell.’ And Adnan had ridden in and driven Hae’s car many times, all their friends said so. The ripped out page showed a whole lot more than just Leakin Park. In fact, it showed their whole neighborhood, the school, the malls, probably ninety percent of where they most often drove. And that page didn’t have Adnan’s prints on it. His palm print was only on the back cover of the book. Plus, thirteen other, unidentified prints turned up on and in the map book. None of them matched Adnan, or Jay. So, the prints weren’t exactly conclusive."

The author continued, "Plus, I'm not really sure of the State's theory here. Are they claiming that Adnan was wearing and not wearing gloves at different points during the crime, which explains why his palm print was on the back cover of the map book but none of his prints were on the torn out page? Overall, this piece of forensic evidence seems pretty meaningless."

I grant that this evidence is not a slam dunk, but I don't agree that it is meaningless.
 
Chris_Halkides said:
Obviously, I agree. With respect to Adnan Sayed there is some evidence against him. For example there is a map with his palm print. At EvidenceProfBlog, the author quoted Serial: "The defense argued, ‘well, you can’t put a timestamp on fingerprints, they could’ve been six week-old fingerprints or six month-old fingerprints, there’s no way to tell.’ And Adnan had ridden in and driven Hae’s car many times, all their friends said so. The ripped out page showed a whole lot more than just Leakin Park. In fact, it showed their whole neighborhood, the school, the malls, probably ninety percent of where they most often drove. And that page didn’t have Adnan’s prints on it. His palm print was only on the back cover of the book. Plus, thirteen other, unidentified prints turned up on and in the map book. None of them matched Adnan, or Jay. So, the prints weren’t exactly conclusive."

The author continued, "Plus, I'm not really sure of the State's theory here. Are they claiming that Adnan was wearing and not wearing gloves at different points during the crime, which explains why his palm print was on the back cover of the map book but none of his prints were on the torn out page? Overall, this piece of forensic evidence seems pretty meaningless."

I grant that this evidence is not a slam dunk, but I don't agree that it is meaningless.
Click to expand...

What gets me is that they claim to have found another person who wanted her dead. I'm assuming this is based on some actual physical evidence--a letter to her or someone else? Remember one of the pieces of evidence mentioned in Serial was a note that Sayed passed to a classmate about how he was going to kill her. The podcaster laughed it off as something from a grade-b movie, but now apparently we have another guy passing around these notes (and nobody but Adnan getting caught)? Two guys in one high school fantasizing about killing one gal? Makes little sense.
 
Last edited:
post-conviction review processes

At CNN Jennifer Rogers (pondering prosecutorial conviction review) wrote, "Had Syed’s case been evaluated by an office that is serious about and dedicated to meaningful conviction review, the realization that his case did not hold together on closer inspection may have come years ago. Robust conviction review may not have helped Adnan Syed, but could help scores of similarly-situated defendants down the road." There are some links to other stories with a modest amount of additional information about the case, but some of the stories are behind paywalls. Regarding post-conviction review, I am skeptical that an office associated with law enforcement is likely to do a good job. Maybe conviction review should be part of the judicial branch.
 
Our legal system baffles me.

I'm less interested in whether the trial was fair or not (I'm not equipped to say), but more interested in the probability of Adnan's guilt. I was at 95%+ prior to this news. Having not seen the actual new evidence, I guess I'm at 90% for now?

If Adnan didn't do it, he's the victim of gypsy-curse level bad luck.
 
I should bloody well hope there was some evidence against him. I know that Luke Mitchell proves it's possible to get a conviction for murder against someone with the square root of bugger-all evidence against him, but most of the time I would imagine there's something.

Does it stack up to BRD, that's the question. Also, is there proof that evidence was fabricated against him by the police? Because if there is, that should be an acquittal right there.
 
Good article in City Journal about the Baltimore Chief Prosecutor who announced that they no longer had confidence in Syed's conviction. Did you know that she's under federal indictment for attempting to swindle the feds out of Covid-19 relief funds that she used to buy a vacation home in Florida?

There's pushback on the Brady violations:

The Maryland attorney general, who had handled Syed’s appeals, flatly contradicted Mosby on the issue of whether the evidence was disclosed, known as a Brady violation. “Among the other serious problems with the motion to vacate, the allegations related to Brady violations are incorrect,” the attorney general stated. “Neither State’s Attorney Mosby nor anyone from her office bothered to consult with either the Assistant State’s Attorney who prosecuted the case or with anyone in my office regarding these alleged violations. The file in this case was made available on several occasions to the defense.”
Click to expand...
 
interested party

I would take at a deep discount anything Jay Wilds said. He was almost certainly involved in some way; in addition, he may have been paid for his testimony, as I suggested well upthread. If there is a case to be made for Mr. Syed's guilt apart from his testimony, then it would emerge at a retrial, if one takes place.

On the other hand, Brady violations are a common component of wrongful convictions. Furthermore, the notion that the state might be whitewashing misconduct is not absurd. That is what happened in the first conviction of Steven Avery, at least according to Michael Griesbach.
 
So Opening Arguments have an episode where they respond to Adnan Syed's release.

They start talking about it around 8 minutes in after talking about De Santis's stuff.

They take the line that as far as they can see it is obvious that Adnan was guilty. Apparently they had a previous episode in which they said this, and Rabia Choudary called Andrew Torrez a racist for it and blocked him on Twitter.

But they argue that they still think Adnan is guilty and almost nothing that appears in the motion to vacate the prosecution seems to be new. They also point to the fact that Mosby is herself under investigation as a good reason to take her with a pinch of salt.

That said, they also see Maryland Police as being almost hopelessly corrupt, and that they probably did cut corners. Personally they also consider 23 years long enough for a murder committed by a teen.

Here is the episode.

But of course, if your aim is to get Adnan off, the best course of action is to go with reasonable doubt. No doubt that makes sense from Adnan's point of view, but it still leaves the question of who did it. And there, it seems almost impossible to construct a plausible story that doesn't involve Jay and Adnan. There is lots of anomaly hunting around the cellphone towers. Maybe, possibly, they are not entirely accurate etc... or Jay sometimes gets the time mixed up, etc... But the big picture seems to implicate Adnan.

In fact, they even go as far as to say that the only way to get Adnan off the hook is to essentially start using conspiracy theory methodology, using various arguments that when put together are mutually incompatible. I thought the same thing when looking at the possible two other suspects that when they are condensed into a single person, things look damning, but we don't know which suspect did what and it relies on layering lots of pieces of pretty flimsy reasoning on top of another.

I looked again at the timeline that Serial put up and was struck by the fact that Adnan was calling Hae's home, as well as Jenn's home (where Jay was), as well as Jay, and that they clearly spent a lot of time together. Was there any reason Adnan was calling Hae? And what about the missing time? At one point, Adnan is just seen to be having a "free period". Okay, but what was he doing? And he was late to psychology class. Then apparently he met Asia McClain in the library, but he was also receiving calls and called Jenn's house again during this time.

It doesn't look to me as though Adnan's alibi is that strong.

Then, why would Jay be so adamant that Adnan did it? What would be the point of that?

Timeline.
 
Prediction: Absolutely nothing will come of the two new "suspects". This isn't the next phase of a whodunnit. The case was cracked long ago.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom