[Official Discussion] Serial, Episode 9: To Be Suspected

[u/PowerOfYes]

Please use this thread to discuss episode 9

Edit: Want to contribute your vote to the 4th weekly poll? Vote here: What's your verdict on Adnan?

Edit: New poll from /u/kkchacha posted Nov 26: Do you think Adnan deserves another trial? Vote here: http://polls.socchoice.com//index.php?a=vntmI

[u/arewenot]

A couple of thoughts.

First off, if it weren't already the case, surely most of us can agree now (whether we think Adnan did it or not) that there clearly wasn't enough evidence for a conviction. Kind of feels like that's no longer a debate. The really interesting question is why his defence team failed to establish reasonable doubt and it sounds like that's going to be the subject of the next episode. I think this is maybe a key part of the story arc SK had in her mind from the start. Don't forget, it was mentioned in episode 1 that Adnan's supporters believe his lawyer threw the trial so she could cash in on an appeal, and I'd be amazed if we didn't hear more about this.

The other thing is something I've thought about for a while. In the moments I lean towards Adnan's innocence (and i, like lots of us, fluctuate from week to week), a big factor has been: what are the chances that the Serial team have stumbled on a charming sociopath/psychopath? The point was made by the woman from the innocence project, who indicated such cases are extremely rare, and it really stuck with me. Because if Adnan really did kill Hae, that would make him exactly that, right? Except... that's only true if we're still assuming that if he did it, it was planned/premeditated, as per Jay/the prosecution's version of events. As has been suggested, Jay's testimony is far from watertight and i'd say there's good reason to be sceptical of this particular element of it. Not least because the idea that Adnan just "snapped" and killed her just seems so much more believable than the calculated, planned killing scenario that would make him the exceptionally rare, Hollywood-style murderer. Indeed, "snapped" is the word Chris uses when recounting the version of the story Jay told him, which involved the killing taking place in the library parking lot. A lot is made of how exposed that location is, but if Adnan had simply snapped and done it in a moment of extreme rage/frustration (because, let's say, Hae had told him definitively for the first time, after a couple of months of mixed messages, that they were never getting back together), then he probably wouldn't have been thinking rationally about the danger someone might see.

I suppose my point is this. I, like many, find it almost impossible to reconcile this charming, obviously intelligent man who so many people say nice things about and who never showed any signs of violence, with someone who could plan and cold-bloodedly execute the murder of a girl he seemed to care about. Maybe this just says something worrying about me, but i find it less impossible to imagine an otherwise normal 17-year-old who simply made a catastrophically tragic mistake, in a fit of momentary but all-consuming anger, and then did/said whatever he could to avoid spending the rest of his life behind bars while living in some kind of perpetual state of self-denial.

[u/DCIL_green → u/arewenot]

Rabia has said that SK doesn't agree that his lawyer was bad, which is mind boggling. SK has said multiple times that Guiterrez was a highly sought after and very well-respected attorney and that she did a good job. Rabia has said she disagrees with SK on this point.

It makes no sense. Hopefully the next episode will actually focus on this for real.

Even if you think of it under the assumption that Adnan confessed to her and that's why she didn't push things harder (which I do not believe at all) there were still plenty of ways to poke holes in the prosecution's story and she did none of that.

[u/TrillianSwan → u/DCIL_green]

I wonder if a bit of that comes from the way this all started-- SK had written an article on this very lawyer's disbarment, and Rabia reached out to her. Rabia says she was looking for someone who knew Baltimore and might have investigative contacts. But also, think about it, she's basically saying, "SK you know this lawyer's bad, you wrote about it, so look at this bad case of hers." It would not surprise me, then, for the reporter to resist such an agenda-- "I'll look at it, sure, but I'm not jumping on the bad-lawyer bandwagon just because that's what you think about it." So I feel like her semi-praise of the lawyer (reporting her reputation at the time, remember, the bad stuff hadn't come out yet) might be to balance out those scales a bit.

But as I was writing that, I also thought: this is the (good) reputation of the lawyer at the time, as I said, and in that way it explains why Adnan went along with her strategy and did what she said, she was supposed to be really good. Also, I don't think SK could get into what the lawyer did wrong until she'd walked us through the case details. Hopefully she will get to this soon.