Serial - the podcast *spoilers*

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?

seems kind of dumb talking about Jay's community and "snitching culture"

"Good blogger" actually not so impressive overall and big on wild stretches. Recent example:

Jay starts out he's at home at 4:58.
Cops incorrectly think cell tower for 4:58 call is far away from Jay's home and close to Cathy's house.
Jay oh wait I'm must be at Cathy's at 4:58.
Cops realize mistake and figure out cell tower for 4:58 call is actually near Jay's house.
Jay says oh I was at home then.
Blogger he was COACHED here is the evidence!

There is nothing nefarious here. Jay's confronted with a piece of evidence that seems to contradict his (shoddy) memory of events. Police say "are you sure you were at home?" Jay says "oh I must have gone to Cathy's earlier" thinking well here is this piece of paper indicating HE MUST HAVE DONE JUST THAT. Police say okay. Police come back with corrected tower info and say "wait we were wrong about where that tower was, were you actually at you own house after all?" and Jay says "yeah I was at home, I thought for sure I was." There is nothing remarkable in this and I think just about every non-Jay human would also conclude that they might be misremembering where they were and adjust accordingly.

I feel like "good blogger" and some other pro-Adnan folks have little dials they use to lower their IQs when trying to imagine why a black drug dealer in Baltimore might not have a lot of trust in the police.

I think Susan Simpson could have won Adnan's trial, I'll say that. I don't know how her courtroom demeanor is, but she sounds like a very good lawyer.

I do think that she's so certain Adnan couldn't have done it that she's willing to draw every inference against Jay. But she's very good at poking holes in the prosecutor's theory, and showing why, actually, it's not completely certain that the phone records back up Jay on "the essential points." Ultimately trials aren't decided on airtightness though, they're decided on juries assessing the credibility of the story. One of the juror's interviewed on Serial said she just believed Jay, that the story was believable. Yes, part of this was thinking he was going to get jail time (it's not clear whether he actually knew he wasn't), but she heard him there in the trial and believed him.

xp I agree completely on that point about the "coaching." Thought that was ridiculous. But she does raise an interesting point -- whether or not there was "nefarious coaching" or just innocent fixing of the story to fit the calls, if the story is completely shaped around the calls then it weakens the certainty that the calls back up the story and vice versa, particularly when Jay can't seem to definitively fix the time of the burial, the time and location of the trunk pop, the "come get me" call, etc.

The calls back up Jay in the following ways:

1) Jay and Adnan both had the access to the phone post-track practice until around 8ish. They were likely together for entire period of time. This matches all the timelines that Jay has provided very generally (if not the exact times or events within timeline) and it is during this period when Jay (usually and most importantly at trial) indicates the body was buried.
2) Based on most of Jay's versions of events Jay and Adnan were burying the body in Leakin Park at roughly the time the Leakin Park pings occurred. This is obv very important if those tower pings are accurate, less meaningful if they are not.
3) Adnan was likely with the phone prior to track (Nisha call). This actually does not match of any of Jay's timelines IIRC, but it does back up Jay's assertion that they were together between school end and track. It matches the prosecutors' timeline (which is almost a "this is what must have happened because Jay doesn't remember good" timeline). Most importantly it completely undermines Adnan's assertion that he did not see Jay until after track.

I'm actually surprised more people don't focus on the 6:59 Yaser call, that one puts the phone in Adnan's hands literally one minute before the page to Jenn, and a few minutes before the (perhaps) Leakin' Park calls. It also gives you AT MOST a two hour window in which the phone could have been back with Jay and not with Adnan, because Adnan pretty clearly starts calling his friends around 9pm. And that's assuming it was like, Adnan calls Yaser, immediately hands the phone back to Jay, Jay drops him off at home or wherever.

Of course, Susan Simpson also now casts some doubt on the pings. As far as the burial time, I don't think Jay in either police interview clearly sets a time on it other than late evening, and even his trial testimony suggests it's later than the 7-8pm timeframe (though it's a little unclear).

So just to give the benefit of the doubt to camp Adnan here, I think they're saying we don't actually have a clear basis to be sure the burial happened in the 7-8pm timeframe, and to the extent Jay's testimony backs that up (I'm not even sure it does), he may have shaped his testimony to fit the cell records so that theory could be pushed.

But I think any pro-camp-Adnan alternate theory would require the burial to happen at another time, because I don't find it very plausible that Jay drops off Adnan at 7pm sharp, keeps the car and phone, immediately pages Jenn, goes and gets Hae's car, buries Hae, ditches the car, and dumps the shovels, and Jay gets back to Adnan (at mosque?) within two hours. It's certainly more possible with Jenn's or someone else's help, completely impossible without it (because it would mean walking long distances as well, not to mention dragging a body by yourself).

I wonder if people will still be impressed with SK/TAL's integrity and sensitivity if they actually sell the adaptation rights to Ryan Fucking Murphy

Woah really. That's shitty.

Wait is this actually happening or just wacky Hollywood rumor weirdness?

RMs production company seems to be the top contender, looking at doing a limited series on HBO, but yeah it could be Hollywood BS

But i love idea of HBO suits thinking "We'll do another show about crime and race in Baltimore but this time let's have an idiot run it"

why is a show about this needed? this case is so boring now.

they need to actually have dennis rodman portray jay and maayybe i watch

something weird about hearing SK tell Terry Gross that she wished there'd been no SNL or Funny or Die parodies because the case is so serious and then finding out that they're shopping Serial around to Hollywood producers. Maybe it's all Ira though.

This is such a bad bad idea.

i guess hbo is also trying 2 spin this to serial fans, it could be really good regardless - robert durst docuseries

http://www.hbo.com/the-jinx-the-life-and-deaths-of-robert-durst#/

Ryan Murphy bursts through the double doors of the conference room, startling the NPR and HBO execs sitting around the table. He stands before them, beaming with utter confidence.

"Ladies and gentlemen, my pitch will be brief." Glancing at the nearest executive, he asks her "May I have your pen?" She looks to the senior executive sitting at the other end of the table, who nods his assent. The exec hands the pen to Murphy. He proceeds to write down a few w brief words on the legal pad she was using. As soon as he finishes he gets up and heads toward the door, but not before turning back to the execs in the room. "You know where to contact me." He bows, turns and exits through the double doors.

A few moments later the senior executive breaks the stunned silence that has overtaken everyone in the conference room. "Wanda, what did Mr. Murphy write down?"

"Just four words" replies the younger executive. She holds up the pad for everyone to see. In bold block lettering filling almost the entire page is Murphy's pitch:

THIS AMERICAN HORROR STORY

Immediately the senior executive leaps up from his chair and jumps on the table. "KAAAAAA-CHING!!!!" he cries as his hair stands on end, his tongue sticks out, and his pupils morph into dollar signs. He then collapses. The next day he is pronounced dead.

https://mobile.twitter.com/rabiasquared/status/556498629872345089

Rabia going on downward spiral