It's kind of a frustrating show. To the extent the point is to establish the truth, as opposed to highlighting an interesting story (and given what's at stake, you'd hope that's the point), the way known information is doled out piecemeal works against it (or rather, the listener). At any given time you have no idea if your hunch that Adnan is guiity, or Jay is, or both, is because that's where the evidence points or because that's what the producers want you to think.
And yet, it's really compelling. And, agreed, the beyond a reasonable doubt part doesn't seem to be there (though it seems some of the exculpatory evidence wasn't raised at trial).
Boomers and, increasingly, Generation Xers fetish-commodify murder because the fear of mortality (and actuarial risk-management practices, I guess) makes sudden, violent death the most outlandish, outrageous, so-nearly-supernatural-as-the-brute-facts-of-contemporary-life-will-accommodate event imaginable, right?
Reddit has transcripts, for anyone who can't/would rather not listen.
... for anyone who can't/would rather not listen wants to re-enact the episodes in the voices of Bugs Bunny and Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
3 is awesome, thanks. I'm in the "would rather not/ain't nobody got time for that" because I just don't want to listen to stuff outside of work and it's not as if I have much time without little ears around anyway. Reading is so much faster and more fun, and since I'm home sick today I can probably get caught up, which I was considering doing anyway but wasn't sure I wanted to. (It's normal, right, that I've read Rabia's blog posts and plenty of the articles about this and even some of the early reddit stuff and just didn't want to listen?)
1: I actually thought Koenig was transparently bending over backwards to stay on the fence. If you're not going to take Jay's story as conclusive of Sayd's guilt (which a reasonable person might. I don't think beyond a reasonable doubt level, but you could believe Jay), the facts she picks up as additionally really troubling are weak sauce.
The big ones are that, at a time when Sayd says that Jay had his car and cell phone, while most of the calls are to Jay's friends there's one call to a friend of Sayd's. She remembers a call like the one Jay describes, but her testimony pretty solidly puts it on a later date, and she only remembers one such call. At that point, there doesn't seem anything hard to believe at all about Jay having made the call on the relevant day, either accidentally or on purpose, and not having actually spoken to the girl whose landline it was.
And the second bad fact is that someone saw Jay and Sayd together (at a point when they both agree they were together and after the murder had happened) and thought that Sayd was stoned out of his mind, and that he acted really paranoid when the police called him to ask him if he knew where the victim was. And really, isn't "stoned" a complete explanation for "acted paranoid when the police called"?
The problem I'm having at this point is figuring out what the alternative is. (Agreed that the case seems to be weak.) Who did it, in such a way that Jay knew where the car was, helped bury the body, with the foresight to get Syed's phone and make a fake phone call to a friend so that he could be framed for it later?
I think either Adnan did it (most likely), or the police told Jay what to say and where the car was. I agree with Cala that there aren't reasonable "Jay did it" explanations. But the prosecutor's version is so broken that I don't think I understand how, where, or when Adnan would have done it.
I had no idea what Serial was until my daughter mentioned it to me as she was catching up on it over Thanksgiving. I had assumed it was a new TV show that. Anyway, this recent NYT interview with Koenig may be of interest to the cognoscenti. Or maybe everyone has already read it.
Another thing that's bothering me about the podcast is that a lot of the story seems to be "and the testimony of this witness is inconsistent!" without a lot of context for how much that matters. We know that eyewitnesses are unreliable, which is a good reason to be skeptical that eyewitness testimony is a good record of what happened. But that also means that small inconsistencies are to be expected -- what I need is context. In a case where the guy who they think done it actually done it, what kinds of inconsistencies are there?
8 and 9 nail it. I'm not sure about reasonable doubt, but (absent some really f-ed up witness coaching) Jay was involved, and either Adnan did it or Jay is covering for who really did, and there's no credible alternative theory to explain why Jay would do that or who Person X might be.
It's frustrating to me that the cell phone evidence is treated as worth talking about, since
a) cell phone tower pings aren't a reliable geolocation signal (a ping does not necessarily go to the nearest tower)
b) the cell phone tower pings only line up with a small part of Jay's story and
c) that's after the story changed to better line up with the cell phone evidence.
It really doesn't prove anything one way or the other.
I don't know if there's a point to reenacting the Serial subreddit on Unfogged, but I think your summary is friendly to Syed, LB. He doesn't have an alibi at all, because there's a chunk of time sufficient to kill someone between school and track practice, and there's an additional bad fact you haven't mentioned: during a time when Syed says he had his cell, it pinged cell towers that locate it in or near the park where the body was buried. I've seen people on the subreddit say that doesn't mean anything, but given that I have other things to do with my life than come to an independent opinion about cell phone signals, I'm heuristically inclined to credit the experts the show supposedly talked to, who, it seemed, said it sounded like he was in the park. At the very least it has to be included on a potential list of bad facts.
Arguably, it looks bad for him that he supposedly told a cop he asked Lee for a ride, and then reversed that story, and two classmates also heard him ask for a ride. It seems like he's lying about something. On the other hand, if this case was invented out of whole cloth by the police, maybe he never originally told the police he asked for a ride, and consistently misremembered.
What I find most annoying about the show is that it's not presenting the case in the most logical priority order, but sticking pretty strictly to SK's (rather daft) POV. She spent four or five episodes on ratholes and red herrings (including an entire episode dissecting worthless cell phone evidence!) before backing up and saying, here's the case more-or-less as presented at trial and here's the arguments for and against believing Jay. She still hasn't spent any time trying to develop an alternative theory of the case. (I guess the Innocence Project people gestured a bit towards possible serial killers, but that was more like, sometimes in wrongful convictions the police ignored a possible serial killer.)
13.1 see 12.2. I'd say it also looks bad for him that part of his alibi is that Jay was carrying around his phone all day, which is a total WTF. But one has to try to imagine how teenagers in 1999 used their cell phones, and who has time for that?
I was a late teen in 1999 and it doesn't sound like something I'd do, but then I only got a mobile at all once I was at university.
IIRC, the big cell phone explosion was after 9/11.
15 see: why do the experts the show consulted say it was a reliable means of location? I have no real opinion either way, except that until someone quotes another expert commenting on the facts of this case who says that the phone couldn't be located with that evidence, I will continue believing, totally without consequence to the world, that the two experts who said that it could were likely correct. Or maybe Dana was just confused about what they said! But given the breadth of the audience of this show, someone with expertise ought to pop up to say that that's bullshit, if it in fact is.
I think I purchased my first cell phone in 1999. I remember thinking it was a bit frivolous. I didn't start to feel like a cell phone was a necessary part of life until 2002 or 2003.
13: Huh, I got that bit crossed up. I thought the time when the phone was in the park was at a time when Sayd's story was that he was not with Jay. But this is wrong:
He doesn't have an alibi at all
He's got the girl who saw him in the library after school. She didn't testify at trial, but she's on contemporaneous record with the story.
I guess, I'm thinking about this from a reasonable doubt point of view. And Jay's story is unbelievable in detail -- the cell phone records don't match where he says they were, he reports a call being made from a non-existent payphone.
That doesn't make Sayd innocent; Jay could be lying or confused in detail but still truthful in the broad outlines. But once Jay's story is demonstrably unreliable, it seems like nowhere near enough to convict someone on without corroborating evidence.
(Sayd's story, that Jay had Sayd's car and cellphone all day? Seems really weird to me too. But no one in the podcast is reacting to it as weird. Either Koenig is slanting the hell out things by not mentioning everyone's incredulity at that bit, or it wasn't weird at that time in that milieu.)
19: Prosecutors can find experts who will say all kinds of shit. There's links somewhere on Reddit discussing the reliability of cell phone pings, but I don't have time now to dig them up.
(I have seen it claimed that there were four separate pings: the south side of the tower north of the park, and the north side of the tower south of the park. I didn't go verify this for myself in the trial records, but if that's the case, that may be why even though cell tower pings are not always reliable, in this case they make it very likely the phone was in or near the park.)
19: My understanding -- I just listened to the whole thing over the course of the last week -- is that experts said the phone could be located reliably, and that present day experts agree with that.
But, what the call log showed was the phone being where Jay said it was for part of the day, and not being where Jay said it was for part of the day, and that the parts of the day where it confirmed Jay's story were the only parts that came out at trial.
I forgot about the car. He lent him his car and his cell phone and he says they really weren't very good friends. Kids!
I forgot about the car. He lent him his car and his cell phone and he says they really weren't very good friends. Kids!
22: I'm talking about the experts Serial talked to! I do not recall any verified expert on the subreddit discussing the facts of this case. I only recall people linking to some general interest article about cell phone records.
I have no idea how that double posted. Unless I blacked out for a few seconds.
what the call log showed was the phone being where Jay said it was for part of the day, and not being where Jay said it was for part of the day
Right. The cell phone evidence does not make Jay a consistent truth-teller. But, if taken at face value, it is a serious bad fact for Syed that at a time when Syed says he has his phone, and claims to be at mosque, the cell phone pings the towers near the park where the body is buried. To get around that and argue for his innocence you need to argue either that the experts the show consulted are mistaken, or that the producer who talked to them misunderstood them, or that Syed himself was mistaken about having his phone because he was stoned and disoriented (which, maybe).
25: This was softpedaled a bit, but I got the impression that Jay was Adnan's dealer. Which snaps a relationship where Adnan is loaning Jay stuff and spending a lot of time with him despite their not being terribly close into plausibility for me.
(Also, exculpatory factors that seemed underemphasized, I think to look evenhanded. Koenig is really troubled by his poor memory of the specifics of the day. The well-confirmed evidence that he spent at least part of the day super stoned sounds to me like all you need to account for poor memory.)
The other thing I wish they weren't being so oblique about is what happened with his defence. He sacked the initial counsel, right? But at what point, and why? From the recordings they played, she sounds terrible - hectoring in a really over the top manner. But I don't really have much to compare it with beyond fictional TV shows and the show claims she was well regarded generally.
To get around that and argue for his innocence you need to argue either that the experts the show consulted are mistaken, or that the producer who talked to them misunderstood them, or that Syed himself was mistaken about having his phone because he was stoned and disoriented (which, maybe).
Or that he was near the park with his phone innocently, which doesn't seem that odd given that the park was pretty near the neighborhood. His version of the day is completely vague -- I don't think the phone being in or near the park is strongly probative of anything. (I would discount the experts being mistaken. I think the strong possibilities for Syed's innocence are that he was wrong about having the phone, or that he was near the park innocently.)
But at what point, and why?
They covered that -- shortly after the trial when they realized she hadn't followed up with the library alibi witness.
he was near the park innocently
Maybe. He does say he was at mosque. It's easier for me to imagine him being confused about having the phone than being confused about being at the mosque, given that he does remember where he was immediately prior to being at the mosque. If he was supposed to be at the mosque for prayers, and didn't show up there, I think that would have stuck out in his mind.
24, 27: As I recall (I don't have time now to dig through the transcripts) she pointed out that the pings aren't very accurate but, typically, had forgotten that by the end of the episode.
The way I understand it, pings don't "snap" to the nearest possible tower. Obviously they give you some coarse location information but they don't really distinguish between two in-range towers. Also, the park tower was in-range from a lot of places he could plausibly be.
I'm not trying to argue this proves his innocence, just that the cell phone evidence has very little value.
I thought he was going to the mosque after prayers, to bring his father food to break his fast. And as I understand it, all these locations are pretty close, so a call from at or near the park en route to or from the mosque isn't ridiculous. But I'd agree that if he's innocent, my guess is that he's wrong about having had the phone at that time.
Regarding the defense attorney, the theory is that she was sick and on a downward spiral. There's also the possibility that he admitted to her, and only her, that he was guilty, which makes her lame cross-examination of Jay and failure to gin up a false alibi a bit more sensical.
There's also the possibility that he admitted to her, and only her, that he was guilty, which makes her lame cross-examination of Jay and failure to gin up a false alibi a bit more sensical.
Really shouldn't. An experienced defense attorney should be used to zealously representing guilty defendants. She shouldn't put testimony that she knows to be false on the stand, but that's different from never talking to an offered alibi witness.
I'm just stuck on one witness, no real corroboration, demonstrably lying on some points, testifying to get a deal from the cops, and that's enough for "beyond a reasonable doubt". Syed easily might have killed Hae; Jay's story gives good reason to suspect him. But that it was enough to get past a jury is really disturbing.
There's only a transcript for the first episode and so now I've listened through mid-6. I like blogs so much better and this TAL setup isn't a good fit for me, I guess. This law blogger, like LB, is hung up on the issue of how the hell this went past reasonable doubt, and what she says reads plausibly to me.
36: From the transcript: "But he says that from what he can remember of the evening, after he got the call from Office Adcock, he remembers dropping Jay off at some point and then he says he would have gone to the mosque for prayers. It was ramadan."
This blogger goes through the the cell evidence in a lot of thoughtful detail:
"This is very strong evidence that the reason the 7:09 and 7:16 p.m. calls were routed from the Leakin Park tower is that the cell phone was, in fact, in Leakin Park. The odds are too much against this being a mere coincidence -- because over the course of 48 hours, only two calls are routed through L689B, and both occur precisely within the one-and-a-half hour window in which we know the killer was in Leakin Park burying Hae's body. This is a sufficient basis from which to conclude that the killer had the phone while burying Hae."
(And thinks AS just forgot lending his cell to Jay.)
I'm just stuck on one witness, no real corroboration, demonstrably lying on some points, testifying to get a deal from the cops, and that's enough for "beyond a reasonable doubt".
I skimmed the transcript and missed the bit where it said Jay was testifying as part of a bargain - is that true? Because that seriously undermines his evidence if so.
I'd buy the last as an explanation -- Jay had been using the phone all day. It doesn't seem unlikely at all that he might have held onto it when Syed dropped him off, and then returned it either to Syed's car or to Syed later. It's a fact that needs to be explained, but nowhere near enough to get past reasonable doubt, IMO.
42: He pleaded guilty to accessory after the fact to murder and was sentenced to two years probation, no jail time.
The case as presented on the radio show is very far from reasonable doubt. But the (wow is she annoying but the music at the gym is even more annoying) host has been pretty clear that the show isn't about the legal standard of guilt, but something else, irreducibly personal to the host and that seems to shift. Either it works on those ill-defined narrative drama grounds or it doesn't. It's a radio play, essentially. Creepiest detail thus far for me is that Syed never called the victim after she was reported missing. After an apparently uninterrupted series of frequent calls, pages, etc., for a year or more, including after they broke up.
The interesting, uncomfortable questions it has brought up for me are around what the hell is happening to Jay in his real life, having had this horrific period dragged into national prominence.
I suspect there would be a hell of a lot less drama and uncertainty if all of the hours of Jay's questioning by the police had been video or audiotaped.
Also in some (one?) of his interviews with the cops he describes himself as an accessory before the fact, but this part of his story changes.
42: ah. And that means there was a bargain in place, presumably? (Don't know how these things normally work.)
I suspect there would be a hell of a lot less drama and uncertainty if all of the hours of Jay's questioning by the police had been video or audiotaped.
They were, weren't they, apart from the very first interview? There are transcripts available here.
I am not clear on the details of how state court plea bargains work in Maryland. But apparently the transcript of his sentencing shows the prosecution arguing for a lenient sentence on the basis of his helpfulness and remorse.
48: Going strictly on the program, I've not looked at anything else, there are tapes of his statements but not of the several hours of questioning/"shaping" by police leading up to those statements.
48: The recordings are incomplete, so you can't entirely rule out shenanigans. The most likely being that the cops pushed him toward a story that best fit the other evidence.
The episode I'm listening to now has about 3 hours of "pre-interview" conversation with the police before they turn on the tape, I think his third interview.
And as pointed out by the retired-cop expert, that is *exactly* when the "shenanigans" happen. Why use that word? It downplays the role of police in regularly perverting the course of justice. It's witness tampering, with the full force of the prosecutorial state behind it.
41: the linked blogger seems pretty sure that Jay is the guilty party - one wonders why the police never looked at him. No obvious motive, I suppose.
but nowhere near enough to get past reasonable doubt, IMO.
I don't think it is, either. I only thought it was somewhat unfair to leave it off a list of bad facts for Adnan. I guess the Nisha call also belongs on that list.
As well as the no obvious motive, assuming the police wanted a murder conviction, if they trust Jay, they've got a case against Adnan. If they think Jay's a liar, they've got nothing against him but his own story and knowledge of the location of Hae's car, which makes him an accessory but not a murderer. They could have taken a flier on investigating Jay's story and hoping to find evidence against him, but that's giving up a bird in the hand. If you assume they overweight closing cases as against getting to the truth, it makes sense.
55: Oh, you're right, it's a bad fact. I was focusing on the bad facts that I thought Koenig was overemphasizing -- the Nisha call and "Cathy"'s sense of his demeanor being paranoid when the police called that night.
(Is it clear that I should really be working?)
58: Are you crazy? We're this close to solving a murder! I'm sure your work-work can't be nearly as important.
For a long time I thought it was literally impossible for Jay to have done it without Adnan because there's no way for them to be in the same place at the same time. But it's possible that Hae called Adnan to ask to meet him and got through to Jay instead on the 2:36 call.
It's really weird to me that the cops never got the records of outgoing calls from the Best Buy or Jenn. It's crazy making not to know who made the incoming calls.
If Adnan did it I think there's almost no way it was premeditated. I think it's ridiculous that the jury thought it was. But if it wasn't premeditated, I'm not sure why one needs more of a motive than "she was his ex." Men kill their exes for no further motive all the time. With an older suspect you'd expect some prior evidence of domestic violence escalating, but with a 17 year old with no prior serious relationships you might not. So the motive part doesn't bother me.
Yeah, I don't think motive cuts one way or the other. She was a recent ex, that makes Syed one of the likelier people to have killed her in general. On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be anything real that puts him at the likelier end of the pool to find a murderer in beyond that.
There is the weird "I WILL KILL" note.
That doesn't seem like anything to me divorced of context. If I were investigating the case, I'd ask Syed what the deal was with it, but Koenig doesn't seem to have and without more I don't think it means much.
Re: 12, an acquaintance of mine (with, broadly speaking, telecommunications expertise as an electrical engineer) who apparently has been helping the producers with some technical details put out the call on social media to see if he could find anyone who could help them break down specific information regarding AT&T's billing practices and cell tower coverage from the time.
In a subsequent discussion, my daughter points out that Koenig probably was not looking to specifically re-investigate the murder as a whodunit, but rather as a lens to look at the justice system through this particular case. But it seems to have become Nancy Grace for people who would never watch Nancy Grace. (See also where the Ferguson threads tend to go.)
I guess there's a reason that the murder mystery is such an enduring genre.
Koenig
The guy who helps the pathetic people who drink coffee by the cup instead of the pot?
The post was actually inspired by Ferguson. Multiple eyewitnesses saying Brown wasn't a threat when Wilson shot him aren't enough for an indictment, because there's a denial from the defendant and contrary eyewitness testimony. But one eyewitness whose testimony is demonstrably unreliable is enough for a conviction at trial. Somehow, it doesn't look as if the standards are being applied uniformly.
LB in 21: But this is wrong:
I didn't mention upthread (I'm waiting for a process to finish now) that even taking the letters at face value, they don't cover all the time. Asia says they left the library around 2:40. Track started at 3:30 (although at one point Adnan says 4:00). That's what I mean by "he doesn't have an alibi." I mean that no matter how generous you are to him, he doesn't have people to account for him through the whole time when the crime could have occurred. It doesn't mean he did it, though.
Oh, fair enough. He has an alibi for 2:30, the time when the state says the murder occurred. He doesn't have complete coverage for the entire afternoon.
The state's murder time is made up whole cloth and has essentially no evidence behind it.
That is something that only the prosecution knows, that would be fascinating if there were any way to get to it. The prosecution set the time of the crime as immediately before the 2:36 call, which looks unlikely, both because of Syed's alibi and because Hae was seen hanging around after school, late enough that there wouldn't have been time for it to have happened. But was the prosecution's selection of the time arbitrary or accidental, or did they somehow eliminate later times as even less plausible?
No way to tell, I think, but you'd love to get the prosecution team to talk about it.
Don't they need the 2:36 call to be "she's dead, come pick me up," in order to make sense of the rest of Jay's story?
Right, but Jay's story is generally kind of hosed. If Syed did it, he didn't do it exactly as Jay described (timeline problems, cell-tower problems). Which doesn't necessarily make Syed innocent, of course.
The question is, if you're willing to give up reconciling anything with Jay's story in detail, is there some reason why the prosecution needed the crime to be that early in order to pin it on Syed? Was there some consideration where a later timeframe would have been a problem for Syed's guilt? Maybe not, maybe it was just their best guess at making Jay's story work. But it'd be good to know what the prosecution was thinking.
Because they haven't got anything else, no physical evidence or any other witnesses but Jay and the cell phone call log linking Syed to the murder.
In a subsequent discussion, my daughter points out that Koenig probably was not looking to specifically re-investigate the murder as a whodunit, but rather as a lens to look at the justice system through this particular case
So far, though, she really hasn't spent much time on the justice system at all. Maybe because the story didn't pan out that way, but still. She asks if the investigation was screwed up - apparently not. She talks about the defence attorney - apparently she was competent, library witness follow-up aside. And so on - to the extent she raises potential systemic issues, she drops them almost straight away.
The longer it's gone on the more meandering it's become, and the more gormless Koenig has started to seem. Not that I think she actually is, but the absence of either an investigative structure or a narrative arc means the show increasingly relies on Koenig sounding ambivalent and vaguely worried regarding her True Feelings about the participants.
So, it seems like there has been a podcasting renaissance as of late. I suspect the next step is for podcasting to start edging in on the more traditional talk radio medium. How long before someone puts together a network of AM stations that get all their content through rebroadcasting podcasts? It seems like you could save a bundle on paying for talent, and programming would consist of a guy queuing up a bunch of podcasts on a desktop computer.
Basically, the Jack FM model, except with podcasts instead of MP3s.
78 doesn't seem like much of a stretch. There's already the TED talk radio show, which seems similar.
Also, I thought I listened to all the episodes yesterday, but there was supposed to be one where The Innocence Project got involved and I missed that. Maybe I missed the latest somehow?
How long before someone puts together a network of AM stations that get all their content through rebroadcasting podcasts?
I think that might have made sense if people had done it five years ago or more, but it's kind of technologically redundant now with the likes of TuneIn and Stitcher increasingly available in cars and indeed portable radios. And of course there already are podcast networks.
More to the point, I think having a podcast DJ teeing up podcasts kind of defeats the point. I mean, I get that it's cheap content from the broadcaster's perspective, but from a listener's perspective, why would you bother when you could just choose the podcasts you like and listen to them when you want to, which is the entire attraction of the medium versus radio?
Has someone linked the thing that Syed's getting an appeal hearing in January? Now to catch up on the thread.
I mean, I get that it's cheap content from the broadcaster's perspective, but from a listener's perspective, why would you bother when you could just choose the podcasts you like and listen to them when you want to, which is the entire attraction of the medium versus radio?
Sure, for the technologically inclined. But my Uncle Cletus isn't going to fuck around with TuneIn and Stitcher. And there is also a level to which I myself can't be arsed. Discovering new podcasts that don't suck is labor-intensive. It would be nicer to turn on the radio, and then maybe there is one on that I like.
It is possible that I have never listened to a podcast in my life. Because of arsedness.
Karina Longworth's Hollywood podcast is pretty good.
King's college has straight philosophy lectures, historyofphilosophy.net
There's a great radio station outside St Louis, KDHX
A lot of people don't know that Moby is, in fact, my Uncle Cletus.
80: That was episode 7. The latest episode is primarily interviews with Adnan, and opens with a potpourri of updates (e.g., about the Best Buy payphone).
Latest episode also called into question the Asia McClain alibi for Adnan at the library, because she appears to have been misremembering the date based on the weather?
As above, that alibi only mattered for the (vanishingly unlikely) 2:30 timeframe, so I still am leaning "he didn't do it."
I don't remember that from episode 9, and I can't find it by searching the transcript. Do you mean a different episode, or am I missing it in this one?
It looks like I did somehow skip 7, do seem to have listened to 9. Also, I'm Moby on a lot of fronts, but at least now I've listened to a podcast. Still, cheap port, cold dead fingers, etc.
I was wrong; it wasn't on the podcast episode, it was on their blog.
That doesn't bother me. Her first letter is March 1, 1999, saying that she remembered seeing him on January 13, and doesn't reference the snow.
Tying it to the school closure for an ice storm on 1/14 seems to happen in her later conversations with Syed's family (and in her much later conversations with Koenig), and it'd be natural to conflate in a snowy evening. Obviously, nothing's certain and she could still be wrong, but that doesn't seem terribly credibility disturbing to me.
(If she had recalled snow as part of her interaction with Syed -- "I remember talking to him and thinking about whether it would be safe to drive home in the snow" -- that'd kill it if it wasn't snowy that day. But associating a snowstorm that would have started hours later with the wrong day doesn't seem like much of a problem.)
And more strongly, because the possible rival day, the real first snow of the year, was a day when school was closed. So she couldn't have had a library interaction with Syed on a day with a snowy evening: there's no possibility of an accurate library/snowy evening story that just got moved to the wrong day.
She might still be inaccurate, either mistaken or lying for some reason. But the snow thing looks to be to be within the normal parameters for messed up memory of something from long ago.
77: Yeah, it's a little off that the important part about this tale of true crime is how the reporter feels about everyone.
94: I thought this was thrown into sharp relief by the one and only sequence, short but brutal, describing the victim's mother on the stand and the family's evident determination to have absolutely nothing to do with the series.
This article and the critiques it us commenting on are interesting: http://m.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/unpacking-the-social-justice-critique-of-serial/383071/
While I find the serial journalist's mannerisms somewhat annoying, I end up agreeing with the linked article's conclusion re the series.
I've now dipped a bit into the commentary on the show (hadn't before) and am surprised at how differently I perceive the people interviewed/described than the (largely white UMC) commentators I've read/heard. In particular, I seem to have a very different reaction to Jay than others do. The excerpts from his interview with the police when he described his prior interactions with them, and his fear of being persecuted or unjustly convicted rang completely true to me. His statement that he was perceived by peers as "the criminal element of Woodlawn" struck me as an understandably jaded description of how OTHERS see him, not an admission. And the habitual lying about inconsequential things seemed completely of a piece with a teenager with stronger than usual impulses towards individuality feeling super crammed into a depersonalized role of the scary black teenage dope dealer. At the same time I would be completely unsurprised to learn he was a dope dealer.
Bombshell in this weeks episode -- not relating to Syed's factual innocence or not, but the screwed-up-ness of the prosecution's case. Not only was Jay testifying pursuant to a plea agreement, but the prosecution arranged for him to have a free lawyer representing him in relation to the proceedings. That is bizarre and improper and arguably bribing a witness for testimony.
I ran out of time in my commute, and haven't listened to the final five minutes of the episode about the upcoming appeal. But I'd think he should have won the last appeal on the above facts alone (while not having any sense at all of what arguments the appeal lawyers raised, or any detailed sense of Maryland law on the subject, so there may be a perfectly good explanation for why the initial appeal was unsuccessful).
And also lots of stuff about how the defense lawyer was becoming very ill in a way that led her to screw up all her cases at the time, but that was less interesting.
