“The presumption of innocence is the principle that one is considered innocent unless proven guilty.” (Wikipedia). Today I’m going to be writing about Adnan Syed, the innocent man in jail.
Adnan Syed was sentenced to a lifetime in prison in February of 2000 after being convicted for murdering ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee. Lee first disappeared on January 13, 1999, her body was found four weeks later — her cause of death, manual strangulation.
Syed was first created a suspect after his former friend, Jay Wilds, told the story of Adnan Murdering Lee to the police. A podcast by the name of Serial covered the story of Lee’s disappearance, Syed’s conviction, and investigated further into the future as well. Serial’s beloved host Sarah Koenig, falls down this winding road and finds it very difficult at times to understand why it was that Adnan could ever have been proven guilty. I too felt like this while listening to the podcast, and it made me wonder, what do they really have against Adnan?
To begin, I’m going to talk about the interviews with Adnan’s friend Jay. Jay has four interviews with the people behind Serial and each time his story becomes a little bit farther off from that of the last. In the first interview, Jay tells Keonig that Adnan had told him that he was going to kill Hae 5 days before her suspected death, in the next interview he claims that it was actually the day of her death that Adnan told him that. In the following interviews, he claims that he was not involved in the burial and then in the next said he was. Jay even proceeded to alter the story again in 2014. Now, Jay’s inconsistencies in his stories don’t go to say that Adnan didn’t murder Hae but it does tell you that Jay isn’t a reliable source. Jay changes his story too many times, his memory may have been skewed because of drugs or even because he was shaken up by his friend telling him he was going to murder someone but that still leaves Jay as an unreliable source.
Next, the cell phone evidence presented in court. It was presented in court that Syed’s phone pinged a cell phone tower which placed him at Leakin Park at 7:09 on the night of Hae’s disappearance. This was a great deal of evidence in the case because it was thought that this confirmed he was there when really it too is extremely unreliable. That AT&T tower covers Leakin park as well as much of the surrounding area, in addition to this, AT&T also included that “Outgoing calls only are reliable for location status. Any incoming calls will NOT be considered reliable information for location”. This reveals how truly unreliable the cell tower evidence is, seeing as it isn’t even “evidence” at all.
My position in this case isn’t to say how it is clear that Adnan didn’t kill Hae, I am simply stating how it was unreasonable for him the be convicted for something that the state didn’t have strong evidence of. Yes, it is valid to use his Adnan’s social tendencies and his relationship to Hae before she died as a motive to further support presented evidence, but I believe that it should not be used as “evidence” since it has no relation to the death of Hae. The only other sets of evidence presented in the case such as the timing of the cell phone tower and the timestamps of phone calls are all very easily deconstructed back to the point where it could have been anyone, even someone who wasn’t an initial suspect.
Frankly, I believe that this case didn’t go on long enough. There were too many unexplored possibilities that should have been uncovered upon realizing the lack of definite evidence, evidence that directly connects to the death of Hae Min Lee. An example of this is Asia McClain.
The fact that she was completely excluded from the first hearing is crazy to think about. Asia is Adnan’s perfect alibi, if Jay’s word and Adnan’s potential motives were enough to sway the ruling to guilty, a simple alibi protecting Adnan should have declared him innocent since no other evidence against him was valid. From that point, if justice still needs to be met then other suspects could be looked into.
also like to take pictures which can spark my memory as well. Sarah’s point was that no one really remembers the details of just the average day, people could recall their usual routine but that’s about it. That’s really scary in the context of the story, there were so many people surrounding the victim and the suspect that thought that it was just an average day. No one remembers those average days, only the events within them, which is the reason that Adnan Syed is still locked up for something he may not have ever done. 
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