Serial - the podcast *spoilers*

Wow this whole thing has come full circle.

Man, that blogger I like is good. She has picked up, that the map of the cellphonetowers, that the police made, got the position of one of the cellphonetowers wrong, placed it two miles further to the south. And that Jay in his second statement, the first made after the police got the map, has him placing every call he makes from that tower two miles too much to the south. So either a) We're dealing with an incredible coincidence or ii) The police coached his statement, using a faulty map.

http://viewfromll2.com/2015/01/13/serial-evidence-that-jays-story-was-coached-to-fit-the-cellphone-records/

Doesn't really change a thing, really, but it's some good snooping around.

That is certainly good work, but I think she draws some very wild conclusions, even more so in the comment threads.

The thing is, I haven't re-looked at the calls, but it seems like this discovery could just as easily wind up cutting against "team Adnan" as for, i.e. if it provides an explanation for some of the inconsistencies in Jay's stories (you know, he gives one story, then finds out the cell records say otherwise [based on a false tower location] and then thinks "oh, well i must be remembering wrong, x happened after y, not before...")

One can interpret that as nefarious "coaching" but otoh, if I were trying to reconstruct a day from a few months ago and my cell phone log didn't match my memory of it, I'd assume the log was right and my memory was wrong. So I think she's overinterpreting things a little.

Weeeelll. The story of the prosecution is that the cellphonerecords support Jays testimony. So if Jays story appears to have been coached based on the cellphonerecords, then that discredits that claim. In general. But no, Jay not being at his own home doesn't mean anything. And nobody really believes anything about Jays story anyway, so, you know. It doesn't support Adnan's innocence at all. It's more indicative of Adnan being 'railroaded' (I'm not entirely sure what this means, but it's in the intercept story) and it's perhaps something that CG should have figured out.

The story of the prosecution is that the cell phone records support Jay's testimony on "key points," not on every detail.

The 'coaching' must have taken place at the second interview, on March 15th, and weirdly, the notes from the three hours before the recorder was turned on dissapeared from the case file. So, it does not look good. But it says nothing about Adnans innocence either.

Taking it back to the big picture, I just don't see how "police coached Jay to give false testimony" squares with "Jay plotted to frame Adnan for the murder he himself committed." Those seem like two difficult theories to hold in your mind at the same time.

I don't see how? Police had a witness against Adnan, nothing against Jay. So they just went with what they could prosecute - and what they believed - and started working on making the case as strong as could be.

And Jay is meanwhile trying to frame Adnan himself but completely inept at it?

What do you mean by 'meanwhile'? There are almost two months between the day of the murder and the second interview.

I mean that you're saying Jay tries to frame Adnan yet doesn't have his story straight at all, and hence is fully open to "coaching" by the police.

Oh, right. But he does have a story in the first interview, it just doesn't match the cellphoneevidence, the police later discover. It matches Jenns story, though, also again on the parts that doesn't match cellphoneevidence...

Jay's complete inability to figure out how long he was doing something or when he did it would almost be comical if the stakes weren't so high.

I can imagine that must have been driving police crazy.

Frederik, just so I understand, you are saying that Jay and Jenn conspired to kill Hae and cover it up and frame Adnan, got their story together, and then police coached Jay to give a different story?

Yes because they didn't know about the cell records. Once they see the cell records they change their stories to fit those because they are coached to do so by the police.

Well, not exactly. In my speculative theory, the whole thing develops over time. There are no conspiracies or anything.

seems like nobody's theory grapples with Jay's new story about burying Hae around midnight. Maybe those Leakin Park calls came in while Jay, or Adnan, or Adnan & Jay were scoping out a burial site earlier in the night

So Adnan's appeal based on ineffective counsel was denied. Based on what I'm reading that means last hope here for Adnan is basically that DNA evidence at the scene implicates a known criminal, right? Or is there a possible petition based on some other means?

Nobody wants to grapple with the midnight story. For the JailAdnan people, it means that there is nothing connecting Adnan to the burial, and the FreeAdnan people just wants to shout PerjuryPerjury. Also, iirc, Stephanie, Jenn and Cathy testified as to where Jay was from 11 onwards, so the story doesn't really fit.

IIRC he says something vague like "later...closer to midnight." Maybe that means 10pm filtered through his 15 year old memory. It's hard to grapple with because it's so long ago now and so much detail wasn't filled in in the intercept version.

If the 709 and 716 calls aren't the burial calls is there some location other than leakin park that that tower covers that would be plausible? Maybe it's en route between two places?

Well depending on whose explanation of cell tower technology you believe it could come from anywhere because they are incoming calls...

Right, but there's a call at 10:30 at Adnan's house. I don't know, seems more likely to me that he misremembers completely or made something up? Yeah, it's tough to tell, because the interview is so shitty, but he does say that Sarah Koenig told him about new 'evidence'. Perhaps she said that Adnan had an alibi at the time of the murder, and Jay, whether Adnan did it or not, got scared and delayed the whole thing a few hours?

Man, if Jay has actually been trying to tell the truth to he police, he must be the most confused of all. They showed him a faulty map that didn't square with what he remembered, and they for some reason really really wanted the come-get-me call to be the 2:36 one.

That said I've only seen that being posited by "non-experts" who are relying on the AT&T cover letter...

I think it's safe to say Jay has no idea "when" exactly anything happens from basically the get go.

Which to be fair is totally fair. I'm not sure if someone asked me to construct a totally accurate timeline of a day (even an obviously important one like this one) that occurred weeks (and now fifteen years) ago I'd be able to do it (esp. if I was getting pretty high for parts of that day). Weirder thing is obv totally random tangents that occur in his timeline. I don't think anyone has a good explanation for those though... unless again Jay just totally smooshes every day with Adnan in his mind together.

Those Ed Notes at Intercept are still so weird. Just checked this:

TI: Let’s talk about the mistrial. The first trial got scratched because the judge called Cristina a liar?

KU: He didn’t directly call her a liar. I don’t remember what he said. Like I said, Cristina was very quick. And she saw that, and she yelled very loudly, ‘Judge, you just called me a liar.’ So the entire courtroom heard her. She saw the opportunity to get a mistrial, and she went for it. [Ed. note: According to trial transcripts as read by Sarah Koenig on "Serial," Gutierrez said, 'It's very hard to be quiet when a court is accusing me of lying.']

I listened to the relevant part of Serial. They explicitly say that the judge says she's lying. More than once. Why would intercept rely on Serial to correct exactly what CG is saying, but not also check if KU is correct on the judge?

Why does it matter? His point is the same and Urick basically says he doesn't remember exact wording.

you guys are still going, huh

It's just such a shitty bunch of articles, poorly done interview, and then poorly edited and factchecked. The nadir was obviously the long introduction to the first part of Uricks interview, but all in all, the whole thing has been a tragicomic farce. Glad it's done.

I agree the NVC interviews are disappointing, because it just seems like she didn't know the case that well herself, hadn't spent time with the documents the way all the obsessives have, so if the point was to quiet the obsessives, she did a bad job by not really knowing when something was incorrect. In defense of Urick, this is a 15-year-old case for him and I doubt HE was about to spend dozens of hours re-reading everything from the case just for a single interview, so to the extent he gets things wrong, I'm guessing some of it is just misremembering.

Well, sure. But then the factchecking is also awful, even though they spent a week more than they planned to, so... Just bad bad bad from the intercept.

I don't know what people mean by "factchecking" -- should they be changing Urick's quotes?

Well, the problem obviously really began when they made that long stupid introduction repeating faulty things Urick said. But once you start writing notes to the interview, do it right. Most of what they write in their notes just make it all more confusing.

+ ther's a bunch of other statements by Urick that could need a note once they started.

I have to admit, that blogger is brilliant.

I can't tell anymore if I actually disagree with her on some things because she's woven such a complex web of interrelated points and I feel like it would take me a week to sort everything out.

But it also makes me wonder: given enough time and resources and complexity, would it be possible to create a reasonable doubt in many, many other "solved" cases as well?

Like one thing I wonder a lot: what if the case simply didn't involve cell phones at all? What if it was just Jay's testimony, never altered in any way to match cell phone records, just his rough, imperfect recollection of the day, with nothing to properly "verify" it. And what if, going a step further, they more "thoroughly" investigated Jay and found nothing more conclusive on his role? (after all, it was strangulation -- you're not going to find a murder weapon, there may simply not be conclusive DNA, it's hard to imagine what a search of his house would turn up). So all you have is (1) the testimony of a guy who admits to being an accomplice after the fact, (2) a highly plausible though not air-tight motive, and (3) the absence of a more likely suspect. What do you do? Prosecute Adnan? Prosecute no one? This is the kind of more general "question about the criminal justice system" that the whole thing raises for me.

Try for a plea with Adnan. Failing that probably prosecute with weak case.

I think cases involving the rich and famous has showed that with enough money and a good enough lawyer, almost everything can go away. In Serial they keep saying that this case is special, that most murdertrials are pretty open and shut. And no matter what happened, the murderer was incredibly lucky, killing Hae in public and not being noticed. It's a weird case from the start.

Total aside, but is anyone familiar with research on juries' ability to assess credibility? I have googled around but I can only find stuff specifically relating to visual cues, not the ability to assess credibility more generally.

Not even sure how you would measure that? I mean what's the credibility control?

The AV Club has a long interview with that good blogger: http://www.avclub.com/article/week-serial-serial-v-club-seeks-legal-counsel-213915 It's interesting.

That was a disappointing interview. At more than one point, it sounded like the interviewers were busy doing something else at the time.

Or, at any rate, hadn't actually read the blog.

Yeah, it's not a very good podcast. It's far better than last week, though, which they allude to throughout the interview. And the thing about the prosecution being really late in turning over evidence to the defence, and the transcripts from Jays interview for example only getting to CG on the day of his cross examination, that is interesting. And Susan Simpson is great.

The day of the cross examination of the first or second trial? If that's true that does seem totally unfair, but even if true for first trial how could it be true for second?

"good blogger" not so impressive on that podcast. Evidence of Jay "lying" is being offended that Serial aired the words "animal rage" about him?