Just goes to show what can happen when you get featured in a viral hit podcast. That’s a great outcome for him but I shudder to think about what it tells us about our judicial system.
All of the above plus the racial and income inequality, nonsense war on drugs, etc.
Yeah, I'd say we should all shudder quite a bit more about our judicial system.
Things like asset forfeiture, qualified immunity, etc. are all pretty strong arguments that police have too much power. Not to mention all of the cases where someone innocent is killed by police, where the victim doesn't get to go in front of a judge because they are dead.
In many cases, the potential sentence for these cases is exceeded by the time they would actually spend in jail waiting for the trial; even being found guilty would result in time served. In these cases, the plea deal is literally a lesser sentence than being found not guilty.
This is not at all true, at least in the sense that it provides a major check on police mistakes or abuse.
You can spend a great deal of time in jail, literally decades in extreme cases, just by being charged with a crime -- no conviction needed. Criminal penalties in the US are so extreme, and conviction rates so high, that there is a huge risk in going to trial. Even if a person is innocent and/or the evidence is weak, the incentives often push them to accept a plea deal; and that's exactly what we see. The vast majority of cases reach a plea deal and never come to trial.
There's a lot of injustice tied up in expediting cases. Massive backlogs of work, not enough people to do the work, and massively asymmetric funding for prosecution and defense.
One example is this podcast going over a cleared suspects apparently falsified alibi records (his mom who was a manager at his store chain and may have doctored his work record to prevent police going after him): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l6dApX2rIY
The main summary points are here, taken from this reddit page (which links to the primary sources) https://www.reddit.com/r/serialpodcast/comments/xea7pu/here_...:
1. Two new suspects that were not properly ruled out.
2. One of the suspects had a) threatened to kill the victim and b) provided motives for the threat.
3. The victim's car was located directly behind one of those suspects relative's house.
4. One of the suspects attacked a woman in her vehicle, engaged in serial rape and assault, engaged in violence against women he knew, and was improperly ruled out.
5. Incoming call data was determined to be completely unreliable, as the network sends the signal through multiple towers and the billing records can show the last tower a phone connected to instead of the one it is currently on.
6. Kristina Vinson said she would not have missed a class at the same time she said Jay and Adnan were at her house, which showed that her recollection of what day Jay and Adnan had visited was wrong.
7. Because Jay had told numerous lies and versions of events to detectives, his testimony was only relied upon because the cell records and Vinson's testimony corroborated it. Without those, his testimony does not stand on its own. Thus, they could not have secured a conviction.
8. One of the lead detectives on the case engaged in egregious misconduct in another case, resulting in a wrongful conviction and 17 years of incarceration.
They had detailed witness testimony which fit the evidence AND the witness was able to show the police the location of the victim’s car which backed up his story. So it is hard to explain another version of events where the witness was not actually involved in the crime. I’m curious if any of this new evidence points to him as being involved.
That's the "great" outcome of a one-in-a-million burst of publicity. Everybody else has it much, much worse.
Wrongful convictions are tragic, but the 50% of murderers that are free is also tragic.
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/07/poli...
Coincidentally, this is the general topic of season 3 of Serial.
This isn't a case of mistaken identity - he was shot by the person he shot. He had a gun that had been discharged 5 times.
What am I missing? What's his explanation for having fired 5 times? All I saw was a vague claim that police shot him randomly as he crossed the street.
I remember listening to Serial and thinking Adnan Syed's advocate Rabia Chaudry seemed more convinced of his innocence than he was. Like he was maintaining his innocence for his family then she came along and started pushing harder to get him out and he was along for the ride.
Victims don't always act as we might expect. So that might just be the way he is. Hopefully concrete proof will come out to say exactly who it was. I hope this for the family of Hae Min Lee. But is possible it never does.
Unfortunately I think many people are uncomfortable with the lack of closure behind such a situation, but that's another angle of our justice system more people should probably be conscious of.
He wasn’t ruled innocent… there was something technically wrong with the trial proceedings.