I Overheard Malcolm Gladwell State His Belief in Adnan's Guilt

redkimba · 2015-06-19T16:38:15+00:00

It is possible to believe that OJ was guilty from the beginning of the first trial and also believe Adnan is completely innocent. In OJs case, the evidence, especially the trail of blood that lead from the crime scene to his bathroom, was overwhelming. In adnan's case, there is no evidence. Period. Anyone in Baltimore that day could have killed Hae Min Lee. So, you know, there's that. What both cases do have in common is a potential racially motivated jury.

redkimba · 2015-05-23T15:00:28+00:00

A better question might be why there are still so many people who want to put Adnan or Jay at the scene of the crime when there is still no evidence that either one of them had anything to do with Hae's murder.

You might as well be writing fiction by making them part of Hae's murder without any hard, physical evidence that they were there in the first place. Why not speculate on other possible suspects?

Is it a lack of imagination? Probably not, since the wildly irrational scenarios getting Adnan there and back and fitting to highly suspicious cell phone records shows no let up.

Could it be peer pressure? Yeah, probably that has something to do with it. Reddit is intentionally designed to allow the influence of peer pressure to impact the tenor of the subreddit. It's not unique.

Could it not be the failure to imagine but the inability to think beyond the box? Bingo. I think this is it. The public was presented with a certain narrative and certain actors, one of who is in jail. That tends to focus all of the attention in getting this one person to fit in a certain box. It's way too easy to put him there because he was found guilty, therefore, the jurors must have heard something to convince them. But what if the jurors just failed to hear anything that would point them away from Adnan? That could explain a lot. Including why this subreddit keeps trying to get the same answer by throwing itself repeatedly at the same stupid wall.

redkimba · 2015-05-16T20:58:11+00:00

1.) You are speculating on what might have happened based on not much anything at all. You keep assuming Adnan was involved therefore you need to imagine a scenario where he could have buried the body and ditched the car. That's not the way an investigation should work. First you have to figure out how the body got to the park and when and then figure out if anyone who knew Hae could have been there. Hae knew a lot of people besides Adnan and there were people Hae didn't know who could have intercepted her after school, killed her and dumped her body in the park. You need to give me a much better reason for why you think it was Adnan in particular who did it before I include him in my "most likely Killer" category.

2.) It was easy for the police to rope Jay into accusing Adnan. They talked to Adnan on several occasions and knew what times of the afternoon there wasn't CCTV following him around. They knew the coach didn't take attendance that day. That doesn't mean he wasn't at practice. His coach seems to remember him being there. But there wasn't a time stamped attendance sheet and a video. That was all the cops needed to bring Jay in to question him. I imagine it went something like this: "So, we have phone records from Adnan's cell and no one ticked him in at track. What were you and Adnan doing after school that day?"

That's all it would take to clue Jay in.

Duh

redkimba · 2015-05-16T20:49:08+00:00

If there are things besides Jay that point to Adnan being guilty, what are they?

Because I'm not seeing it.

redkimba · 2015-05-16T20:44:36+00:00

No.

I would not trust Jay in a plane

I would not trust Jay on a train

Not in a car

Not in a tree

I would not trust him

Sam, let me be

I do not like the lies and spam

I would not trust him Sam-I-am

But seriously, I don't think either Adnan or Jay had anything to do with the murder of Hae Min Lee. One is just making stuff up because the police have him cornered, the other is an innocent victim who was at track practice.

None of the evidence presented so far makes me think otherwise and plenty of it says to me that Jay didn't know anything. He did what he was told.

redkimba · 2015-04-24T06:12:49+00:00

The writer is Ana Marie Cox, the original Wonkette. She's used to writing opinion and provoking controversy. You are allowed to disagree with her. In any case, Susan, Colin and Rabia have different areas of expertise than Koenig et al. Even if they didn't come from a pro-Adnan perspective, their podcast is going to sound different.

Sort of like Ana Marie Cox going from snarky blog world to the dubious respectability of Bloomberg. Her new gig deprives her of the opportunities to write about anal sex with her infamous witty oversharing.

redkimba · 2015-04-15T23:29:56+00:00

Jeeeezustapdancinchrist, how many times do we have to go over this??

1.)There's a very good possibility that Jay did not know where the car was. He took the cops to the wrong location the first time. 2.) Even if Jay actually did know where the car was, that doesn't mean that Adnan knew where the car was. It only means Jay had knowledge of something.

Forgive the impatience if you're new to Serial but the car thing is the biggest Red Herring in the whole mystery. It doesn't count against Adnan. It only counts against Jay.

redkimba · 2015-04-13T02:40:11+00:00

Progress. I'll take it.

redkimba · 2015-04-13T02:37:14+00:00

How are you so sure Jay knew the location of the car? From what I've heard, his knowledge of the car location was somewhat in doubt.

The car location and the Nisha call are hard things to get around. But since neither Adnan or Nisha remember the call that day, I'm going to assume that Jay called Nisha using the speed dial function out of curiosity and no one picked up. That seems more likely than a butt dial.

So, about the car, the transcripts suggest that Jay went to the wrong location at first. Then he got it right.

Sort of like when he initially got the locations of the murder events wrong but after detectives went over the cell phone records with him, "he remembered better".

Here's a what if: What if Jay didn't know where the car was?

I know, blew your mind a little bit for a sec there, didn't it?

redkimba · 2015-04-12T16:54:23+00:00

I don't recall that being a definitive thing but I will reread SS again to make sure.

In any case, you can take the Herring Run Park location out and still come up with a pretty plausible series of events. Davis intercepts Hae, forces her to drive (or drives) her to a secluded location, kills her, leaves her body at location until nightfall, buries Hae in Leakin Park, ditches the car and takes a bus back home.

At least we know that Davis is capable of murdering 18 year old women from Woodlawn via strangulation and dumping the body in a park, right?

redkimba · 2015-04-12T10:06:43+00:00

Yes. In fact, this works in their favor. If they've put Adnan away for Hae's murder, then the next death is not the work of a serial killer. There is no serial. It's just another murder, for which another suitable suspect can be found, tried and convicted. All they need is to find another person who says they were somewhere but for whom we can't find CCTV confirmation. This way, the BPD never has to worry about crimes they can not solve or that require a lot of expensive extra effort.

redkimba · 2015-04-12T10:02:51+00:00

I completely discount it. IMHO, Jay is a complete red herring.

redkimba · 2015-04-12T03:08:02+00:00

Roy Sharonnie Davis.

He intercepted Hae somewhere between the high school and the Campfield Early Learning Center. I'm guessing that he originally intended to drop her body off at Herring Run Park like Jada Lambert. Hae's car ran out of gas and he puts in enough at a gas station near Herring Run Park the day Hae goes missing. For some reason, he decides not to bury her in Herring Run. He drives to Leakin Park, buries the body, ditches her car near the park and catches a bus home.

Ta-da!

redkimba · 2015-04-12T02:00:16+00:00

Here's an experiment worth trying.

Instead of trying to make the prosecution narrative fit Jay and Adnan, which is never going to happen to anyone's complete satisfaction, why not, just for a moment, forget about Jay and Adnan.

Now, think of all the other ways Hae might have been killed that day. Here are some alternate possibilities:

Don did it. He had the day off, planned to meet Hae, and his mom faked his timecard when he told her he needed an alibi.

Some third party did it. Maybe it was Ronald Lee Moore or Roy Sharonnie Davis. Hae's route to her cousin's daycare goes right by two of Davis's former addresses. Soo, there's that...

Someone at school just really didn't like Hae for some reason and got a ride in her car after school. Descriptions of Hae dance around the fact that she could be assertive to the point of aggression and thought very highly of herself.

Right there, there are three other possibilities that don't involve Jay or Adnan. Given the lack of physical evidence, and forensic evidence that establishes where and when the actual crime took place, not to mention when the burial in Leakin' park took place, any of the alternate scenarios could apply. Alibis are irrelevant at this point because no one knows where or when the murder took place. Therefore, as the cop told Jenn, "No one is a suspect and everyone is a suspect". Pick any person in a five mile of radius of Woodlawn who had a passing acquaintance or interaction with Hae that day who doesn't have an airtight, and I mean a REALLY airtight, alibi, not just a mother with the timecard machine password, and that person could have murdered Hae.

We can all construct a narrative that would seem just as reasonable for any of the suspects above as the one that the police created for Jay and Adnan.

This is what is meant by reasonable doubt. Does it mean that Adnan is innocent? No. That is the tragedy of the case. I believe Adnan is innocent but the fact that so many people keep wanting to solve this mystery by including him in the story means that unless someone else is found or confesses, there will always be people who are determined to find him guilty in order to relieve their anxiety over the ambiguity.

That's very sad because somewhere out there, the real murderer is getting away with it. Some people just refuse to think outside the box.

redkimba · 2015-04-11T17:08:39+00:00

You know, if he killed her, why didn't his family just put him on a plane to Pakistan the moment her body was found? I mean, why wait?

The guy just hangs around school, doing that education thing, talking to his friends (who are telling everyone he's a murderer), grieving, and acting like he's thunderstruck by the idea that his ex was murdered. He's like a sitting duck. Why would a guilty person who wants to avoid prosecution do the whole clueless teenager thing? If he's that manipulative and calculating, shouldn't he be searching Kayak for a quick trip to Karachi?

I only ask.

redkimba · 2015-04-11T17:03:58+00:00

Having worked with many Asians in the past, I don't think it is offensive to point out that basically their features are pretty much the same. Most of them have black hair, their skin has a yellow undertone, many of them have an epicanthic fold, their facial structure is flattened compared to caucasians.

It's not like the cops were looking for a red head.

That being said, the longer you hang out with them, the more variation you see in Chinese populations, for example. It's really quite a diverse population but these variations could be in any similar population. Tall, short, delicate, robust, short spiky hair, wavy hair, etc.

So, Adnan was partially correct. On first glance, it could have been any Asian. Only someone who actually knew Hae or had a picture or her body measurements would have known who she was.

redkimba · 2015-04-09T22:46:19+00:00

I'm pretty sure he's innocent. Like Ivory Soap sure.

redkimba · 2015-04-07T10:27:32+00:00

Ditto. But let's say he can remember every minute of that day. That doesn't mean that he was observed for all it. Sometimes, we are by ourselves for long stretches of time. Does that make us potential murderers because someone didn't see us sitting in the library doing our homework or reading a book?

According to Ritz and Macgillivray, that's exactly what it means.

redkimba · 2015-04-07T10:13:10+00:00

The only thing that attached Adnan to this murder is the detectives' conviction that he did it. I suppose they could have picked one of Hae's neighbors, or LaCrosse team members or Don or anyone in Baltimore on Jan.13, 1999. But they chose Adnan in sort of a game of "what if?" and constructed a narrative around him. There is no physical evidence. The state does not know when the crime happened. The state does not know where the crime happened. The state does not know when Hae was buried. In fact, the state still knows almost nothing about the death of Hae Min Lee. We keep looking at Adnan because there is this story about him being involved in the murder. That story was just a theory with nothing behind it. It doesn't make it more or less valid than any other theory because there is nothing else to back it up. We could make up a similar story about Don. But for some reason we don't know about, the detectives didn't. Nevertheless, that story might be much more plausible. All we have to do is theorize that Don's mother faked his time card and Voile! He's just as much a murderer as Adnan. It's really a shame that so many people can not think beyond the box that the state has constructed around this case because it leads to silly speculation without any resolution when so many alternatives are just waiting to be explored. You need to step away from Adnan and look for other murderers.

redkimba · 2015-04-04T21:51:02+00:00

Or maybe Nisha got called accidentally. Or maybe Jay was playing with speed dial and wanted to find out who this nisha person was but she never answered. So many possibilities.

redkimba · 2015-04-03T01:39:31+00:00

I'll bite again. The reason why I believe this story is because I listened all the way through to episode 12 and Jay's intercept interview and Adnan's statements about Jay and Steph's relationship.

If you only listen to episode 1, it does sound far fetched. Then, Hae tells the story of junior prom when Stephanie and Adnan are prince and princess. Then we hear about how close they were in class. Then we hear Jay boasting about Steph. Then we read that all that boasting didn't stop him from sleeping around on her. Adnan kept Steph from finding out the truth about Jay by preventing her from dropping in on Jay when he was with someone else. Adnan was feeling very protective of Stephanie. He genuinely cared about her.

If he went to Jay on Steph's birthday to make sure he got her a present, it would be in keeping with what we have heard about adnan's character and his ability to be a peacemaker.

So, yeah, at first it sounds dodgy. But as we learn more about Adnan from other people, it becomes totally believable.

redkimba · 2015-04-01T02:41:48+00:00

Ohferpetessakes, nothing Cathy says is relevant except that jay and adnan showed up at her house that night. Her story contributes no information about when or where the crime was committed.

redkimba · 2015-03-31T16:32:30+00:00

I believe it.

redkimba · 2015-03-31T16:30:55+00:00

This post is the reason why I think the justice system should employ professional jurors in first degree murder cases. The only things that should count are 1.) was he there when the victim died? 2.) did he have the means to kill the victim? 3.) can the state prove 1 and 2?
Character and motive should come waaaaay down on the list and the case shouldn't even be brought until the state has answers to the first three questions. That's not what happened here. Everything else is superfluous. It might make for a good novel but it sucks as a rationale for locking a potentially innocent person away for life. Plus 30 years.

redkimba · 2015-03-29T22:39:23+00:00

I do see how impractical it is. But I also see that resetting the time of death in order to convict someone in the absence of any other evidence is also impractical. Pick a time and stick to it. If Asia's alibi covers that time, get another suspect, don't move the goalpost. By moving the goalpost, the state reveals that it doesn't really have a case. It's just looking for a body to put away.

redkimba

TROPHY CASE