Appeals Court Upholds New Trial for Subject of 'Serial'
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
If you believe Adnan is guilty - he goes free because of poor prosecution and defense; If you believe Adnan is not guilty - he spend years in jail for a crime he didn't commit - because of poor prosecution and defense.
:(
Real tragedy in this case how the justice system can be so easily manipulated by the media.
I spent some time looking into this case as well and came to the conclusion that there is simply not enough information to definitively conclude anything, and that people seem too eager to take several leaps of faith to assume he’s guilty. He very well may be, but it isn’t close to being proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Every piece of evidence used to convict him is sketchy in some way.
Not sure how you believe people are too eager to see him as guilty when the only reason anyone knows about him is a campaign to free him.
It is absolutely ridiculous to claim the fingerprints have significance. Fingerprints on a weapon, or her clothes, or even the trunk or door handles are evidence. Fingerprints on a map are meaningless when he had probably been in her car dozens of times before as her boyfriend.
The real significance of the finger prints isn't that Syed's were there, but that they were there and no other suspects were. Someone with murderous intent was in that car, and the evidence shows that Syed was at least recently in car while all other suspects have no evidence that they were.
The thing is that the evidence is not compelling at all. It relies on sketchy cell phone evidence and the witness of a guy who told three entirely different versions of his story.
The cell phone evidence is so bad that the expert who testified for the prosecution retracted his analysis during the appeal. Prosecutors presented location for incoming calls as evidence, even though the AT&T call log made it clear that incoming calls did not have valid location info. The police mistakenly placed one of the towers in Patapsco State park, and the first version of Jay’s story had them driving through there. The police fixed their map and the second version of his story does not have them going to that park. That seems pretty clear that he was being coached, which puts the claim that “he knew where the car was” in doubt.
The American system is founded on the exact opposite principle: the State must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Syed is guilty. Syed doesn't even have to show that he is innocent, just that the State can't prove his guilt.
In the case of the fingerprints, as many other posters have pointed out, he was the victim's boyfriend and so had been in her car many times. The presence of his fingerprints in her care is therefore neither surprising nor evidence of guilt. It just shows that at some point he was in her car, which already know was true many times.
It's not for Syed to explain away the fingerprints, it's for the State to explain how it proves beyond a reasonable doubt that he committed the murder. Despite your numerous erroneous assertions to the contrary, the evidence presented by the State is extremely weak and circumstantial, and testimony of their key witness demonstrated to be extremely unreliable.
Not to mention your assumption that it MUST be one of the listed suspects, and since their fingerprints weren't there it must be Syed. It's possible the killer was an unknown person. It's possible one of the other suspects wore gloves or some other protection against fingerprints. It's also possible Syed was the killer, but the fingerprints being in the car are not in any way proof of that because, as noted above, their presence is to be expected.
Yours is precisely the kind of mindset the entire system is set up to avoid. Thankfully people who actually know the law and have gone over the evidence haven't approached this question with your attitude.
One of the many eye-opening things in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH_nP8pX4Fg is that during a long questioning session the police will often introduce facts about the case to see if you recognize them, then forget that they did so, then hours later ask a different question and your knowledge of the facts that you were previously told BY THE POLICE is now evidence against you.
This happens frequently enough that I would want to know that an independent third party reviewed tapes of all questioning of Jay before concluding that he in fact had previous independent knowledge of any fact about the crime.
I do think this is the central question the retrial should deal with.
1) Cell phone data was used as evidence to convict him. It later came out that at the time it wasn't that accurate and that the prosecution misled the jury about it (perhaps based on the prosecution not understanding the data either). Also of interest was how much trouble the judge, prosecutors and jury had with making sense of this data. Cell phone location data is way better today, but when this kind of data first became available -- much like DNA evidence -- juries have trouble making sense of it.
2) This trial is also interesting from a DNA evidence perspective. A lot of people feel that DNA evidence makes a case ope and shut, but everyone involved with this case was purported to be friends. So, what does some small amount of DNA evidence mean in a case like this?
I find this trial is also interesting as we look at data from home AI speakers. I get the sense that we may have a few trials like this coming up in the future where the quality or type of data that a home AI speaker records is misunderstood, and it leads to bad evidence being shared.
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting.
That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to
reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that
gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.