This lawyer has outlined five points upon which Jay might have committed perjury. And this is based on just Part 1 of the three-part interview. Part 2 is up now and 3 is being posted tomorrow.
The attorney for "Serial" podcast subject Adnan Syed says key cellphone evidence used against his client was unreliable — by the phone company's own warning — and should have been excluded from his murder trial.
In a court motion filed Monday, C. Justin Brown said incoming calls to Syed's cellphone were used by prosecutors to place him at Leakin Park when authorities believe the body of his ex-girlfriend was buried. Syed was convicted in 2000 of murder in the death of Hae Min Lee and is serving a life sentence.
Bergdahl was held prisoner by the Haqqani network, a Taliban-allied guerilla insurgent group. He painted himself as an honorable deserter, claiming that he was abducted after intentionally walking off his outpost to call attention to troubling conditions. But his fellow soldiers say his intentions weren't so honorable. He has been charged with desertion and misbehavior before the enemy, which carries a life sentence.
Syed's Motion to Re-Open Post-Conviction proceedings was granted today. Syed will be allowed to introduce evidence related to the alibi and the cell tower issue.
Can't say I particularly care about the story, even after the first episode. I'm not going to unsubscribe, but it's going to be pretty much at the bottom of my queue unless the buzz becomes tremendous.
I've heard four of the five episodes released so far, and I'm a bit ambivalent about it. On the one hand, during a listening session, I find myself invested in the story more than enough to want to know more about what happened. On the other hand, I'm not as invested in the story as with season one, which mainly manifests itself between episodes: I don't feel the strong "gimme the next episode, NOW" effect that other series cause.
I'm learning a lot about Afghanistan and Pakistan, though, which can't hurt. The little inroad into the reasons underlying why the Raqqani are tolerated as a lawless force in their part of Pakistan was interesting enough.
Anyone else still listening to this? What do you think?
I was about to give up on it until the most recent episode. I was interested in that one most out of all of the ones so far.
My biggest problem with this season is that unlike with Adnan, no one from Serial is talking to Bergdahl. Sure, we are able to hear his voice, but it's in phone conversations with that documentary filmmaker that recorded their calls. So they seem to have to have structured their episodes around that footage, and haven't been able to go in other directions as much as they might have.
Plus, those calls aren't really gripping. The guy he's talking to is sometimes typing or doing the dishes while talking to Bergdahl...he sounds bored a lot of the time. It doesn't make for great radio.
I think Serial is aware of a lot of the talk that this season is boring and not as good as the first one. When the last one came out, they were tweeting about it heavily, linking to additional materials on their website. It seemed like they were trying to get people more interested in it, I don't remember them being that active on Twitter before.
Another issue I think is the setting. I don't know Baltimore and the surrounding areas, but the places they talked about in season one I could see in my mind. A high school after classes let out, a Best Buy parking lot, a forest off of a road...it was much more familiar to me than Afghanistan and Pakistan. I know that's why they've put a lot of work into showing the places on their website, but it still feels not as immediate as Adnan and Hei.
Yeah, this season has been a real clanger for me. Sayed's case was compelling because there was a decent chance he was wrongly convicted. Plus, the story was finished and ripe to be reopened. Bergdahl's case hasn't even finished playing out yet, and there's really no he said/they said at play. I'm still listening, but mainly because I don't want to lose my time-already-invested.
Agreed. The naif act worked in Sayed's case because you genuinely couldn't make heads or tails of some of the scenarios. It feels put-on this time to create tension where none actually exists. Nobody here seems at a real loss to explain what happened.
ursus arctos wrote: Koenig's naif act is really beginning to grate on me.
Haha, you may not want to listen to the Syed update. She and Dana Chivis seemed to have no idea why a prosecutor would want to poke holes in a defense witness' testimony. That, or they did a really bad job of dumbing things down for anyone listening.
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