
Adnan Syed, of ‘Serial’ Podcast, Gets a Retrial in Murder Case - mcgwiz
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/01/us/serial-adnan-syed-new-trial.html
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danso
If you haven't listened to the original season...despite the insufferably
overwhelming hype it has received (including for its purported role in single-
handedly revitalizing the podcast industry), Serial is still very much worth a
listen. It seems a lot of people were annoyed by how it didn't advocate a
strong conclusion (e.g. Adnan is innocent/guilty)...to me, that was never the
point...I loved it not just a time capsule of the late 90s and coming-of-age
stories in general, but also a compelling portrait of how fragile our
individual and collective memories are. Even without this recent, dramatic
development, it's one of the best pieces of journalism I've experienced in
recent years.

edit: grammar, and obligatory link to the website for the first season, which
itself is a great example of online journalism in how pieces of evidence
discussed on the show were also uploaded with further explanatory writing:
[https://serialpodcast.org/season-one/1/the-
alibi](https://serialpodcast.org/season-one/1/the-alibi)

One of my favorite bits was the lengths the producers went to confirm whether
or not Best Buy had a payphone 15 years ago. The show, IMO, also served as a
great example of how to do investigative research and is a must-listen for
aspiring journalists for that reason alone.

~~~
MOARDONGZPLZ
I'll provide a counterpoint: I really love listening to podcasts (quick plug
for the "Keepin' It 1600" podcast as my favorite recently) and often in the
crime and justice genre. I mostly got to listening to Serial because I've been
listening to This American Life for a decade; I consider TAL to have about 70%
good content with occasional really good ones (ex: the one explaining the
financial crisis) and occasionally truly terrible ones (ex: the one with the
guy trying to find the origin of a particular hold music tune). Just stating
this so you know where I'm coming from, a background of my tastes.

I found Serial to be grating and and not very good at keeping my attention. I
really didn't understand the hype at all and I really had to force myself to
sit through the last couple episodes just so I could say I finished (I got a
similar feeling when approaching the last episode of the second season of True
Detective). I didn't find the story compelling at all.

~~~
subpixel
I agree, but I give them credit for attempting to do what they ultimately did
not pull off: to find a smoking gun that changes a murder case, in near-real-
time, for an audience of millions.

As a listener, this meant I honestly felt like I had wasted a huge amount of
time on the show.

But I was rooting for them right up to the point at which I began cursing
them.

~~~
7Z7
>As a listener, this meant I honestly felt like I had wasted a huge amount of
time on the show.

That seems like such a weird conclusion to me.

~~~
subpixel
The show was packaged up and delivered as titillating entertainment. A first-
person radio whodunnit for the post-radio age.

So, many weeks later, when the final word was "gosh maybe we'll never know!",
I felt like I'd clicked on a series of those "What happened next will shock
you!" headlines.

A compelling story reaching the same conclusion probably could have been
handled in a single episode.

~~~
madeofpalk
> So, many weeks later, when the final word was "gosh maybe we'll never know!"

But... that's the point. The finally episode spells this out very explicitly -
although they can't say either way whether he did it or not, they found they
don't have sufficient proof they he did commit the crime he was convicted for,
and therefore does not deserve to be in jail.

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geophile
I listened to Serial and enjoyed it, but have not been following the case
fanatically. I think that the massive hype has caused a central point to be
missed: The government alleged that Syed killed Lee, and provided a sequence
of events. Serial raises many questions about whether _that one sequence of
events_ is accurate. It is entirely possibly that Syed killed her but not at
the time and place hypothesized by the government. I think this gets missed in
all the hoopla. "Retrial" suggests to me that it is the exact same scenario
that will be tried once again.

~~~
Falcon9
The retrial had very little to do with Serial, and everything to do with the
fact that the prosecution withheld a cover page from one of their star
witnesses which would have caused him not to give the testimony he gave had he
seen it. That's it. A key piece of "evidence" was the Leakin Park call, and
the cover sheet that was withheld states that the location data from the
Leakin Park call (an incoming call) is not reliable information.

~~~
TwoBit
That hardly convinces me he is innocent.

My problem with Serial is that people listened to it and concluded some
travesty of justice occurred. But the other side doesn't get to tell their
side. Whenever you hear just one side of the story, you can be sure that the
truth is significantly different.

~~~
tallanvor
Yes, but the problem is whether or not the prosecution's case would have been
convincing enough if they had turned over all evidence like they were supposed
to.

Our justice system is supposed to require a high enough burden of proof that
we don't convict innocent people, even if that means some guilty people aren't
convicted as a result. Unfortunately, there have been, and still are, corrupt
prosecutors out there that are more concerned with always getting a conviction
whether or not there's enough evidence to prove the defendant is guilty.

------
JoBrad
While I loved Serial, and think that it is great that he's getting a retrial,
this whole case (and especially the retrial) concerns me. Adnan's family
apparently had some money that they could devote to getting more attention for
him (and that's fantastic), which helped a lot in getting attention for his
case.

But this raises the fact that someone without any means to speak of is
basically screwed. Hearing interviews with people who work with the Innocence
Project, sometimes the case against convicted felons is shockingly flimsy.
Yet, it takes years and a lot of money to get them overturned.

~~~
macspoofing
>But this raises the fact that someone without any means to speak of is
basically screwed.

Absolutely. My takeaway from listening to Undisclosed (a follow-up to Serial
podcast by Adnan's supporters) is how much of a difference having a team of
lawyers and investigators makes to casting doubt on presented evidence. That's
why money makes such a huge difference. It's not corruption. It's manpower.
There is no way a public defender could devote so much time and research like
the Undisclosed team did to, say, present a case against the state's cell
tower evidence - and that was only one piece of evidence presented to the
judge.

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billiam
As someone who attentively listened to the podcasts but became increasingly
frustrated by their sensationalism, I was most interested in the story of the
one person never interviewed, the victim. Is it really such a shock to most of
you that eyewitness accounts from years ago are terrible evidence on which to
convict someone? That the criminal justice system as visited on poor people is
filled with apathy and incompetence?

The state did a terrible job and there should be a retrial. But shouldn't that
poor girl deserve more? Someone killed her. Maybe all the pontificators should
devote themselves to her story with the ardor of their attention to Serial.

~~~
Falcon9
If you listen to the Truth and Justice podcast, there are people doing exactly
as you suggest. Often with semi-reckless abandon and very little to support
their case, but they're trying to use what evidence they have to figure out
what happened and who killed Hae.

Honestly, listening to it only resolves to me that it's better if most people
didn't try to turn their attention to what really happened, because they're
never going to be able to put together enough of the story at this late date
to do more than ruinously speculate. Truth and Justice puts into better
perspective how well Serial did finding what story there was to tell, and
telling it fairly.

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slackstation
I enjoyed Serial but, later read critiques of how the Serial podcast was
making entertainment out of someone's actual life and another person's actual
murder.

As much as I enjoy fictional murder in various mediums, it started to turn my
stomach a bit. These are real lives. People actually died.

It's hard for me to find any kind of entertainment out of the idea that what
seemed like a kind, gentle young person was actually murdered. Whether Adnan
was actually guilty or not, is a matter of the court and maybe the victim's
family. It shouldn't be my entertainment.

~~~
anf
I think turning the listener's stomach was very much the point. Not only did
someone actually get murdered, but the criminal trial that followed it was
horribly mis-managed on multiple fronts. The horror of an insane murderer is
one thing, but the travesty of our slow and deliberate justice system
malfunctioning to such an extreme extent is significantly worse.

~~~
tptacek
I'm glad Syed is getting another trial and certainly the prosecution did not
put on a _flawless_ case, but I think it's a bit of a retcon to suggest that
this is an instance of a prosecution malfunctioning to an _extreme_ extent
(whether it's an instance of the _defense_ doing that: different question).

The prosecution had:

* The confession of an accomplice which included non-public details about the crime

* Cell phone evidence both directly implicating Syed _and_ damaging his alibi

* A series of incriminating misstatements from Syed himself

Remember, the prevailing online sentiment about Hans Reiser was that he'd been
stereotyped and then railroaded into a conviction as well. Reiser's defense
also hinged on the notion that no physical evidence directly connected him to
the crime. But that's not how murder prosecutions work.

~~~
mattdeboard
My issue with the trial was there was no proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

It is like that documentary that caused waves recently, about the guy whose
original rape conviction was overturned by DNA evidence only to get convicted
of murder. It's not that there's no evidence Adnan had something to do with
the killing. It's that the burden of evidence wasn't met.

~~~
tptacek
It's guilt beyond the reasonable doubt _of the jury_. Few people would ever be
convicted if the standard was guilt beyond _anyone 's_ reasonable doubt.

~~~
mattdeboard
The issue though is that his attorney didn't do her job, to the degree that
her didn't-do-her-job-tiveness was actually whatever the equivalent to
malpractice is in law. So my point is that with hindsight and far more
information, in the light of a far more thorough investigation than either
side of the trial did in the first place, there's not enough evidence to rise
above reasonable doubt. In my opinion, as an idiot layman spouting off on the
internet about shit I know nothing about, obviously.

~~~
tptacek
I agree strongly about his attorney. But he didn't end up with a crappy
attorney for want of resources: she was an elite defense attorney, suffering
(we now know) from serious health defects.

Again: my point isn't that the verdict is correct. It's just that this isn't a
great case for prosecution run amok.

------
pyrrhotech
It's highly likely that he did it taking all evidence into consideration, but
there is a small amount of doubt. Who defines what is reasonable? Either way,
17 years in prison for a crime of passion at 17 is probably enough

~~~
atdt
But he hasn't accepted responsibility. He continues to deny his involvement.
And it's the rest of the world that did him wrong.

~~~
bmmayer1
Unless the rest of the world did do him wrong, and he wasn't involved. Then it
would be an outrage for him to have spent any time in prison.

------
thomasthomas
The main alibi was that he was in the library where he would sometimes check
his email after school. Question: Why can't they ask whoever his email
provider was if there's record of him signing in after school? Why didn't they
ask the library if they kept logs on the computers? If a court asked yahoo for
some sort of log record from 1999 would they even have it? I suspect they
would. Would adnan even remember his email address from then?

~~~
duskwuff
If they asked for those records now? Not a chance. Yahoo's webmail
infrastructure has undoubtedly changed numerous times in the last 17 years;
there's absolutely no way they would have bothered to retain IP address logs
across all of those migrations.

~~~
JBReefer
No way. The validity of backwards looking data on every project I've ever
worked on is sacrosanct.

~~~
pfranz
I remember hearing (I can't remember where) they contacted the ISP and they no
longer had logs or maybe even the email account. There was some funny-business
too, if I remember.

I work in film. Once the delivery is out the door the 'pieces' are generally
archived, but even a few months later they don't fit together again. Trying to
recreate the data when working on a sequel, for instance, even only a year
later is a bit like the restoring the Xerox Alto series posted last week.

~~~
TwoBit
I've had the same problem in game development. A few years after you've
shipped a game, you can't build tje source code any more because it's
dependent on tools that aren't supported any more. It's not quite that bad,
but true preservability is hard because all the tools need to be preserved
too.

------
macspoofing
The state won't retry. He's going to walk. Good for him. Who knows if he
really did it or not, but the evidence against him was sketchy.

~~~
jchendy
> The state won't retry.

You say that like it's a fact. What's your evidence?

~~~
macspoofing
Fair. They could retry but I can't see how. They don't really have anything.
Jay is a terrible witness and he won't hold up in a cross, given the amount of
times he changed his story (the latest being his intercept interview last
year). Cell tower evidence is questionable and their expert witness recinded
his testimony. The timeline has never been solid and is even more of a mess
after Undisclosed.

If they retry what evidence will they bring to the table?

~~~
kmonsen
Jay also seems like a coached witness, his value must be close to zero. And
that means the whole investigation was a bit fishy.

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cleandreams
I listened to the whole series and ended up feeling he was guilty. Then I felt
annoyed with the project. I'd spent all these hours getting familiar with a
killer. What a result from this project - maybe a guilty man will get out of
prison.

~~~
obj-g
You'd rather maybe an innocent man stay there?

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nkrisc
If he actually didn't do it, then who did? I have to think we'll never know at
this point.

~~~
marksands07
Did you listen to the podcast? Jay ADMITTED to it. And he walked.

~~~
nostromo
Jay only admitted to helping Syed bury the body.

~~~
marksands07
Ok my mistake. But he's the best lead anyone has at the very least.

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Hydraulix989
redacted

~~~
Others
The "Double Jeopardy" rule only appeals to prosecution. It doesn't mean you
can't appeal your case. In the US we have a system that was designed to
prevent false convictions, even at the cost of some criminals going free.
That's why we have the "Double Jeopardy" rule, innocent until proven guilty,
pleading the fifth, ect.

~~~
Hydraulix989
AHHHH I was confused, and thought that he wasn't originally convicted (maybe
this exposes my own hypocrisy).

------
guelo
I'm a bit at a loss as to why general entertainment pop culture news is
interesting to hackers.

~~~
meddlepal
Because not all of us are robots that only care about making our computers
beep, boop and flash?

~~~
guelo
Geez people really hated my comment. But still, there's entertainment news
everyday but normally it's not at the top of HN. Why this one?

