Serial

Again, I find this bizarre. I really do. I mean, Adnan may very well have done it. It's hard to believe he's telling the whole truth. But you're saying a phone call, placed to a girl, gives you total certainty for a "slam dunk" conviction in a case where there is no forensic evidence (save half a palm print on a map book), witness testimony from someone whose story is wildly inconsistent at best and clearly lying in other parts (and who CLEARLY played some role in this crime), and the word of a girl (15 years after the fact) that she did not have voice mail. (Also, who was not interviewed at the time.)

Slam dunk? Holy moly. If I were a prosecutor, I'd love to have you on a jury.

 

Then how do you explain the call? I agree that it seems that they locked in Adnan right away, and it simply has to be Adnan, Jay or someone unrelated that Jay knows. Without that phone call, I think that there is resonable doubt because there is barely any objective evidence.

But for me there is simply no explanation for the call of that duration unless he made it. Which then blows his alibi of being at track practice out of the water.

 

A butt dial?

Jay picked up Adnan hours later, handed him back his phone, they smoked some weed, then Jay asks to borrow his phone again?

Even if we stipulate that Adnan made that phone call and was not at track practice, how are there not 1,000 holes in his story? We know the Best Buy phone call story is bullshit, because no phone existed. We know the state's timeline for strangling her is almost an impossibility (in a busy parking lot, in broad daylight, even if the buses let out exactly on time and she doesn't stop to get food from the vender outside the gym), and we have Jay saying they went up to Gwynn Falls to smoke weed, and then they buried her? And Jay, one of the toughest dude's in Woodlawn, does all this because Adnan supposedly threatens to hurt Stephanie? Why wouldn't Jay just beat his ass and turn him into the cops? None of Jay's story makes sense. It certainly doesn't add up to a "slam dunk" conviction. Pretty much everything connected to Adnan is circumstantial. Even if I buy the state's flimsy motive argument, they still never proved anything beyond a reasonable doubt.

 

Yeah, I really don't see how someone could see this as a slam dunk that Adnan did it. And Koenig has spent a lot of time on the Nisha call. It's probably the detail she references the most since that episode (and gives her most pause), on top of spending the 10 minutes on it initially.

 

It's not a slam dunk in any direction. Maybe a turnaround from 15 with a hand in your face. Probably not even that. Definitely not a slam dunk.

 

We actually *don't* know that. Sarah tried to research blueprints, phone company records, and came up with zilch either way.

A listener to the podcast contacted her to say that she intimately knew that Best Buy, because she shoplifted there all the time back in the day. She says there wasn't a payphone. That doesn't mean that there wasn't a pay phone.

 

Please refresh me on the Nisha call. I know Adnan said he called her, it must have gone to v-mail. She says she never ever had v-mail. That I remember. But what was the significance?

 

It puts Adnan with Jay during the time he says they were burying Have in Leakin Park. There are a number of calls on the phone that clearly suggest Jay made them during that window, but there would be no reason for Jay to be calling Nisha -- a girl from Silver Spring he did not know -- during that time, and the call is too long to have been a butt dial without voice mail. This was one of the first murder cases in the country to use cell phone technology, so it's pretty much impossible that Jay would have used this in some way to set Adnan up (if we're going to speculate that Adnan might be a sociopath, I think we at least have to entrain that Jay might be one instead).

 

Clearly, the police and defense counsel didn't run the issue of the pay phone to ground and the podcast has been careful to say that there is no evidence of a pay phone, not that there definitively wasn't one. I was surprised that the memory of the listener was such a big thing to put on the podcast.

On the Nisha call, I'd like to know if anyone else at her home could have answered the call. Maybe someone else could have answered and looked for her in the house?

I saw the the podcast website that the theory of the girl that she saw Adnan at the library the night before she was snowed in wasn't accurate because it didn't start snowing that night.

 

So to circle back, if Adnan didn't do it, who did?

Anyway, listened to all nine while driving for turkey day.

So doesn't Don's alibi go up in smoke if the timeline is gone?

He was at LensCrafters but if best buy doesn't have a payphone then doesn't he need to account for more of his day?

I think him and the Virginia innocence project are going to have a larger role down the stretch. How many more episodes?

 

I started listening to the Slate's Serial Spoiler and the Serial Serial podcasts. I think it was Slate's Thanksgiving Day episode that mentioned the Innocence Project has filed a motion for production of, oh crap, I've already forgotten the right name - an evidence kit or something like that. The motion included two potential suspects, neither of which was Jay.

Jay had to be involved.

 

Based upon what he told the police, I don't think that there is a doubt that Jay either did it or he knows who did.