The Serial Case of Adnan Syed, Part 2

My Analysis and Conclusion

If you haven’t read Part 1, you should. You’ll find it in the archives.

At the end of Part 1, I asked you to ponder how you would have voted had you been a juror. It is only a mental exercise. As The Skeptical Juror, I argue that no juror should vote Guilty or Not Guilty until after hearing all of the evidence (which you have not), hearing all of the jury instructions (which you have not), duly deliberating with your fellow jurors (which you have not), carefully comparing the State’s evidence against the law as defined in the jury instructions (which you have not), and having concluded that the State has proven beyond a reasonable doubt each and every element of the crime as outlined in the jury instructions (which you have not). Instead, I ask that each of us merely ponder our half-assed, ill-informed, non-legally binding thoughts on whether or not we would have voted Guilty or Not Guilty in the extremely-unlikely hypothetical event that we were a juror in that case or an identical case.

Allow me to begin with my non-skeptical, half-assed, ill-informed, non-legally binding thoughts. He sure seems guilty, doesn’t he? His accomplice, Jay Wilds, testified against him. Other witnesses substantiate Wilds’s testimony. Syed’s cell phone records place him in Leakin Park where the victim’s body was buried just at the time that Wilds admitted to helping Syed bury the body there. Guilty. He did it. Case closed. Let’s move on to the next one.

However …

And for those of you familiar with my writing, there’s frequently an “However …”

I decided part way through Episode 2 of HBO’s 4-episode series, The Case Against Adnan Syed, that Adnan had been framed. The cops had dutifully recorded their first interview with Jay Wilds, and HBO was replaying excerpts. I’ll provide my transcription.

Wilds: I went to pick him up off Edmondson Avenue.

Cops: You’re waiting when he finally calls around 3:40?

Wilds: Right.

Cops: Then what do you do?

Wilds: I go and pick him up. I went to pick him up from off of Edmondson Avenue.

Cops: And then what happened?

Wilds: When [pause] I followed him [pause] followed him out into …

Cops, interrupting: Did you get out of your car when you get on Edmondson Avenue and have any conversations with him?

Wilds: Umm hum. Yeah.

Cops: Tell me about that.

Wilds: We got out [pause] oh, and we [pause] he’s walking around with red [pause] red gloves on.

Cops: Cloth gloves or …?

Wilds: Yeah, like wool with leather palms in ‘em. Uhm, and then he goes [pause] pops [pause] “I did it. I did it. You don’t fuckin’ believe me? I did it.” Pops the trunk open and Hae’s like all bent up and blue in the trunk.

That’s when I knew that the cops had framed Adnan Syed. I didn’t quite realize at that point that Syed was actually innocent. I only realized that the cops had framed him. That may seem odd to any of you not involved in wrongful convictions, but that’s because you are not familiar with the wrongful-conviction term-of-art called “Framing the Guilty.” Here’s how it works.

The cops already know who the perpetrator is. Of that they have no doubt. Their problem, though, is to build a case to prove their point. They don’t follow the evidence wherever it might lead them. Instead they manufacture the evidence necessary to lead a jury to drink from the he’s-gotta-be-guilty trough. They frame the guilty, for the good of society and their own careers. I’ve seen it so many times that I fear it’s the norm rather than the exception.

One big downside of framing the guilty, though, is that the State sometimes unwittingly frames the innocent. That happens in about 10% of the cases. I’ll address that frequency in some other post.

In the movies, which are not real, an innocent person is framed in brilliant fashion by the actual murderer, the authorities are not clever enough to see through the frame, and the innocent person is saved at the last minute by the heroic move star who figures everything out despite insurmountable obstacles that the star somehow managed to surmount. I remind you that movies are not real.

In the real world, which by definition is real, nearly all the framing that takes place is not accomplished by the so-called bad guys. Nearly all the framing that takes place is accomplished by the so-called good guys, the cops and the prosecutors. Whenever they intentionally withhold a piece of exculpatory evidence, they are framing their favored suspect or their favored defendant. Whenever they engage in perjury or suborn perjury, they are engaged in framing. Whenever they manufacture or alter evidence, they are framing someone. Whenever they “persuade” one or more people to provide false witness against the State’s preferred target, then they are framing someone.

In those few occasions where the framing is discovered and made clear to the public, the framing is called by some milder term such as “harmless error,” “technicality,” or, in extremely extreme cases, “misconduct.” In the real world, such harmless errors and technicalities lead to promotion, re-election, nice retirement packages and imprisonment of the preferred defendant or appellant.

As soon as I heard Jay Wilds stutter and stammer about the red [pause] red gloves, it occurred to me that the cops were framing Syed for the murder. You can see it in the text. The questions and answers were scripted. The cops asked the questions they needed to ask to establish all the elements necessary for pre-meditated murder, and Wilds was going to give them their pre-arranged answer in polite, well-spoken, recorded fashion. Wilds, though, forgot to talk about seeing Syed with red gloves, so the cops reminded him of what he was supposed to say.

Cops: And then what happened?

Wilds: When [pause] I followed him [pause] followed him out into …

Cops, interrupting: Did you get out of your car when you get on Edmondson Avenue and have any conversations with him?

Wilds: Umm hum. Yeah.

Cops: Tell me about that.

Wilds: We got out [pause] oh, and we [pause] he’s walking around with red [pause] red gloves on.

Then I realized further, without ever being told, that there was going to be something about red fibers on or near the body. In fact, the HBO show did make clear, soon after the interview scene just described, that a single red fiber had indeed been found at the burial scene. I later learned that, despite intensive searches of Syed’s home, car, and possessions, the cops never found anything of Syed’s that could have contributed the red fiber found at the scene. The cops used Wilds to put that frame on Syed.

But wait! There’s more.

After their first interview, the police decided to frame Syed in an even more air-tight manner. It would require that they orchestrate a new story and have Wilds tell that new story during a second interview. I pick up the beginning of the second interview, at least the part that the officers decided to record.

Cops: We interviewed you originally on the 28th of February. There were a lot of inconsistencies.

Wilds: Yes.

Cops: To start with, you indicated, when he called you, he was at Edmondson Avenue, where he pops the trunk and shows you the remains. That wasn’t true.

Wilds: No, sir.

Cops: He actually killed her …

Wilds, interrupting: Yes …

Cops, interrupting: … at Best Buy.

Wilds: … to my knowledge.

Cops: To your knowledge?

Wilds: Yes.

Cops: You said in the pre-interview that there may have been a reason why he picked that particular spot.

Wilds: Yes.

Cops: What was the reason again?

Wilds: I later learned that that’s where they used to have sex.

Cops: They used to have sex out in the parking lot?

Wilds: Yes.

I know that you picked up on it yourself. What the hell is a pre-interview? Apparently Wilds changed his story when talking to the police in the pre-interview, so wouldn’t that just be an earlier interview, the previous interview, or some sort of actual interview other than a pre-interview? A little research informs me that, in the minds and phrasing of the Baltimore police, a pre-interview is indeed an interview, but one that is conveniently not recorded. They pre-interviewed Wilds for an hour before his first non-pre-interview interview, when he had to be reminded that he forgot to tell about the glove. Then they pre-interviewed him for more than three hours before his second non-pre-interview interview, before he made clear that he was changing the location where he met Syed, from somewhere on Edmonton Avenue to the parking lot of Best Buy, which is not on Edmonton Avenue.

Here’s what seems to have happened in between. The police acquired Syed’s cell phone records, and they acquired a cell tower map from AT&T Wireless Corporation that explained which cell phone tower best located whence each phone call was placed or received. The cops’ interpretation of that cell phone data was inconsistent with their previous theory of the case, the one that they had Jay Wilds narrate during the first non-pre-interview interview, so they pre-interviewed him again, this time for three-plus hours, to set him straight on why he should narrate the police’s modified theory of the case. Then they turned on the recording equipment, and we finally hear -

Cops: We interviewed you originally on the 28th of February. There were a lot of inconsistencies.

Wilds: Yes.

But the cops, being human like all of us non-law-enforcement slugs, screwed up their second theory of the case even worse than they had screwed up their first. I’m not saying that their second screwed-up-all-to-hell theory wasn’t adequate for a conviction, because it certainly was. Syed is still in prison and almost certainly will be there until he dies. I’m saying instead that at least one skeptical person reviewed the evidence after the conviction and found the huge, gaping holes that so many other non-skeptical people involved in the case had missed. By that at-least-one-skeptical-person, I’m speaking of blogger and attorney Susan Simpson who, in my opinion, was the unintended star of the HBO series. Below, I transcribe much of what she had to say as if it were a monologue, though it was in fact interrupted by all sorts of other visuals and interview segments.

The phone that day was with Jay. So you look at that record and you’re like, he was calling so-and-so, he was doing this. These cops thought the cell phone thing, this was their Bible. This list of towers, they were going to follow that wherever it took them. In this case, it took them on the wrong path.

So the cops are are like really glad after that first interview. They’ve got their star witness, so they put together a to-do list. [She shows a copy of the cop’s actual to-do list.] Item number five on the to-do list is “cell sites mapped,” and item six is “interview Jay second time.”

And they get their maps and they realize they’ve got some very big problems, because Jay’s story is not matching his cell phone records. They get him back in, They fill out a new Miranda waiver. 15:05, 3:05 p.m. is when they start talking to him. Then we get to the recording. [A clip of the recording says it begins at 6:20 p.m.] So we fast fast-forward in time from 3 o’clock to 6:20 p.m. What did they do for those 3 hours and 20 minutes? They workshopped that story. You don’t turn on the tape recorder until you’ve got a statement that you want.

I mean, Jay was a teenager, um, a black guy in Baltimore, being interviewed by homicide detectives who were telling him they wanted him for a murder. And the cops are very good at convincing people that your best bet is to talk yourself out of it when all you’re really doing is talking your way way into it.

Jay says, in that second interview, he knew what Adnan was going to do. He was told the night before, on the 12th. At that point, they could do whatever they wanted with him. They could have gotten him for murder in Baltimore city. They could have sent him to Baltimore county and have him executed.

He was doomed.

My very firmly held theory is that Jay does not know anything, and they had him build a story through a process, and that’s all Jay says.

At this point, my new evidence-analyst-idol, Susan Simpson, begins talking about the cell phone towers.

This is the blob map from AT&T showing what they call coverage areas, but really idealized computer-generated predictions of where each tower is going to cover. They tried to have Jay like track through these little zones. I would bet dollars to donuts the cops had these maps out there as they’re working through their story. Whenever he forgot the script, forgets what he’s supposed to be doing, they’re like, “No!”

Then we have an incoming call, 12:43; another incoming call at 2:36; and another incoming call at 3:15. They’ve got to use one of those options to be their come-and-get-me call. It’s Adnan calling Jay to say “The bitch is dead. Come and get me.” The come-and-get-me call had to be an incoming call because Adnan didn’t have the phone. Jay did.

At trial, 2:36 is the one they kinda settled on, because it’s the only one that’s even remotely plausible. Unfortunately, they had a really big typo on the call phone chronology that they used to try and understand Jay’s story.

On the 2:36 call, they put down that it was at L651C. It was actually at L651B. This is L651. Purple is B. Jenn’s house is about right there, and it’s in L651B.

In his first interview, Jay claimed that he was at Jenn’s house when he took the come-and-get-me call from Adnan, and that he left there at 3:45.

It works perfectly to have the call come in at Jenn’s house. But, because of the cops’ little typo, they had the cell come in at L651C, which is the pink area. He can’t be at Jenn’s house when this come-and-get-me call comes from Adnan. He has to be somewhere further west.

The show then plays a clip of Jay saying, during the second interview, “I had left Jenn’s house because he didn’t call me at the time he said he was. And at that time, I was half way to my house and Jenn’s house, and he told me to meet him at Best Buy.” Recall that in his first interview, he not only called from Jenn’s house, and not only called at 3:45 p.m. he said Adnan told him to meet somewhere along Edmonton Avenue.

And that’s when the come-and-get-me call comes in, when Jay and the phone are conveniently in the territory of L651C. I mean, the story is nonsense because it came from nonsense and it was multiplied by the cell phone records. They kept introducing errors that they would have to correct again.

And Jay would always accommodate them by changing his story to fit whatever they wanted him to say. In return, they charged him with accessory after the fact rather than with conspiracy to murder. They convinced the judge to go easy on him because he was cooperating with their murder investigation. The accommodating judge sentenced Jay to probation on the condition that he continue to cooperate with the police. If he drifted from how the State wanted him to testify, he was off to prison. Only if he behaved could he walk free.

My new evidence-analyst-idol Susan Simpson was hardly done pointing out the shenanigans behind the State’s case. Regarding the incoming calls to Syed’s cell phone while he and Jay were allegedly in Leakin Park, that’s just more crap heaped on a pile of crap already piled beyond the angle of repose. The cell phone records arrived by fax with a cover sheet explicitly stating that the location of incoming calls cannot be accurately located by the cell tower data. Everyone missed it. Even the State’s so-called telecommunications expert (conveniently) missed it. He later signed an affidavit claiming that the prosecutors withheld the cover sheet from him. But that will do Syed no good. Syed is in prison, and he is unlikely to ever again walk free.

So where’s that leave us, pondering whether or not Syed is guilty of innocent? For me, it leaves me confident that he is innocent and wrongfully imprisoned. I’ll close by explaining why.

Syed’s explanation for the day makes no more sense than does Jay’s. Syed claimed that he didn’t know Jay very well, but he worried that Jay had forgotten the birthday of a joint friend, so he lent Jay both his (Syed’s) car and his (Syed’s) cell phone. That’s just more crap, but it doesn’t make him guilty.

I agree with the perspicuous and perspicacious Susan Simpson that Jay Wilds knew nothing about the crime. It doesn’t take much time looking over the wealth of real evidence readily available out there to suspect that Syed and Wilds were flitting about together that day because they were selling drugs; certainly marijuana, perhaps also something heavier. Throughout the HBO series, there were multiple mentions of “10 pounds of marijuana” and being “stoned.” That drug dealing explains the recently acquired cell phone, the willingness to lend a mere acquaintance one’s car and cell phone, and the many, many incoming and outgoing calls distributed hither and non about the area. That explains why Syed was afraid to be honest about what happened that day. That explains also how the cops got their hooks so easily into the not-so-hapless Wilds, which was not a particularly difficult task. As it turns out, Wilds was a serial snitch who had multiple times before escaped punishment for serious crimes by dropping the dime on someone for an unrelated crime. As the old saying goes: “Don’t do the time, drop a dime.”

The sad irony is that the police should have recognized, and certainly may have indeed recognized, that Wilds was Syed’s alibi witness. Wilds knew nothing about the crime, and Wilds was with, or in contact with, Syed for most of the afternoon. They were engaged in something nefarious, but not murderous. That’s why I’m confident that Syed is innocent of Hae Lee’s murder

Certainly you can disagree. Certainly people will continue to argue the many facets of this case. Certainly nothing I write will help free Adnan Syed. For me, it’s yet another dispiriting realization about the sad state of our criminal justice system. A young woman murdered, a family left to grieve, an innocent man behind bars, and the killer walking free.

I’ll not dig deeper into this case because I now choose to spend more of my time on my Louise & Sherlock Project. If you are interested in the more uplifting story of Louise Conan Doyle being the actual creator of Sherlock Holmes, and the author of the early adventures, join me at louiseandsherlock.substack.com.

Good day.