Serial (Podcast)

Jun 15, 2017 8:39:59 GMT -5 Delicious Meatball Sub said:

I said this when we first started talking about the show, but the explosion of true crime entertainment has only increased my frustration with this show. Adnan is guilty. Did he get a fair trial? Maybe not, but that's a different question than whether he was involved in killing an innocent girl. This show is entertainment, not an appeals court, and not a legitimate criminal investigation. Koening didn't ask Adnan hard questions, she didn't push back. She decided early on he was innocent and after that just wanted to do a good show. She was more concerned about Justice for someone she perceived to be innocent than Justice for someone who is actually dead. A good friend of mine was close with the victim. She thinks he did it. He exhibited the classic behavior of a domestic abuser - possessive, angry. She told Koening this when she was interviewed for the show, but when her clip aired she was made to sound much more uncertain about his guilt than she is. Now she has relive this whole ordeal, plus deal with all the amateur sleuths trying to track her down because THEY know Adnan is innocent based on a podcast and some Internet reading.

I certainly understand people's concerns about his trial, and I think those are justified. And maybe he'll end up going free because of that. I doubt it. I think they could retry this and convict him again on the mountain of circumstantial evidence against him. But even if he's not guilty in a court of law, he's still OJ guilty.

If the person who is sitting in jail for it is innocent, then that's not justice for the person who is dead. 

I obviously wasn't there and don't have the first hand experience that your friend has, and I'm truly sorry that your friend had to live through the experience of having her close friend murdered and has had all of that revived by this podcast.  That must be awful for her, and I really cannot even begin to imagine.  But I also don't know your friend, so you saying that she believes he did it doesn't really mean anything at all to me as far as his guilt or innocence.  Subjective belief in anything is so easily influenced by so many factors other than actual truth and facts that a single person's subjective belief, no matter how close they were to the situation, is just not that reliable.  I think, in some ways, being close to the situation can make that belief less reliable. Which is not any kind of judgment on your friend, her memories, or her beliefs.  It's just not something I can base my own opinions on.

And to be clear, like 1karen1, most of my opinions are not based on Serial either.  I think Koenig was trying to balance doing a good show with trying to appear objective (when she clearly had a specific opinion), and in that, there was a fair amount of substance that was left out.  I've never listened to Truth and Justice, but I've listened to quite a bit Rabia Chaudry's podcast, Undisclosed, and some of the points that were brought up in that are really difficult to coordinate with any idea that Jay was telling the truth in any way (the one that stands out to me still, well over a year since I last listened, was that based on the way the blood pooled in Hae's body, there's no way she was in the trunk of the car in the position that Jay said she was in when he says Adnan showed him her body). 

I think I kind of have an almost equal and opposite problem that you do with Serial.  It gets right under my skin when someone says, based on listening to Serial, that they are sure he's guilty because I think that sort of reaction is an example of people making up their minds about someone's guilt or innocence, not based on actual objective evidence or reasoning, but just on how they feel about it and then confirming that feeling with whatever they can make work to confirm it.  I think that's what the police did in this case, and I think it's reflective of a real problem that we have in society in general.  

I don't know.  I wasn't there.  But I haven't seen or heard anything that has convinced me that he's guilty or even anything that made me think that there's a good chance that he's guilty.  But I am totally aware that there is a ton of information I don't have and my primary sources of information have been people who don't think he's guilty, so, in that, those sources are not even close to 100% reliable.  I do feel comfortable saying, though, that some of the objective evidence makes his guilt questionable, the police did some shady things in investigating him, and his attorney was terrible in a way that likely did affect his trial.