Just goes to show what can happen when you get featured in a viral hit podcast. That’s a great outcome for him but I shudder to think about what it tells us about our judicial system.
Our justice system is pretty busted, to be honest. And it's end to end busted - we trust police too much and with too much power, we don't have enough public defenders to protect everyone, we have long backlogs of cases, court fees and fines can be unending even if you are innocent (to say nothing about civil asset forfeiture), people are goaded into plea deals for crimes they don't commit, our jury selection process leaves a lot to be desired, our judges have done things like make deals to get a financial kickback for everyone they send to jail, our sentences are too long for minor crimes, our prisons are dangerously overcrowded making prison basically psychological and physical torture, we invest almost nothing on reducing recidivism, we fail to support inmates post incarceration and make it hard for them to find work, and we generally stigmatize anyone who has had a brush with the system.
All of the above plus the racial and income inequality, nonsense war on drugs, etc.
Yeah, I'd say we should all shudder quite a bit more about our judicial system.
Serial season 3 - where they hang out at a courthouse for a year, learning all of the ins and outs - illustrates all of this very well.
There's a lot of injustice tied up in expediting cases. Massive backlogs of work, not enough people to do the work, and massively asymmetric funding for prosecution and defense.
> Especially since every case makes it’s way in front of a judge.
This is not at all true, at least in the sense that it provides a major check on police mistakes or abuse.
You can spend a great deal of time in jail, literally decades in extreme cases, just by being charged with a crime -- no conviction needed. Criminal penalties in the US are so extreme, and conviction rates so high, that there is a huge risk in going to trial. Even if a person is innocent and/or the evidence is weak, the incentives often push them to accept a plea deal; and that's exactly what we see. The vast majority of cases reach a plea deal and never come to trial.
A case eventually making its way to a judge isn't really a counter-argument to how much power police have.
Things like asset forfeiture, qualified immunity, etc. are all pretty strong arguments that police have too much power. Not to mention all of the cases where someone innocent is killed by police, where the victim doesn't get to go in front of a judge because they are dead.
To expand on this, plea deals are most common for poor defendants. The police convince a magistrate to set cash bail the defendant can't pay, and the defendant has the choice of taking a guilty plea for a "lesser charge" or sitting in jail for months until the case can be tried, at which point they are defended by an overworked, overwhelmed public defender.
In many cases, the potential sentence for these cases is exceeded by the time they would actually spend in jail waiting for the trial; even being found guilty would result in time served. In these cases, the plea deal is literally a lesser sentence than being found not guilty.
Serial is still one of the best true crime podcasts, because the case has so much more underneath the surface.
One example is this podcast going over a cleared suspects apparently falsified alibi records (his mom who was a manager at his store chain and may have doctored his work record to prevent police going after him): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l6dApX2rIY
1. Two new suspects that were not properly ruled out.
2. One of the suspects had a) threatened to kill the victim and b) provided motives for the threat.
3. The victim's car was located directly behind one of those suspects relative's house.
4. One of the suspects attacked a woman in her vehicle, engaged in serial rape and assault, engaged in violence against women he knew, and was improperly ruled out.
5. Incoming call data was determined to be completely unreliable, as the network sends the signal through multiple towers and the billing records can show the last tower a phone connected to instead of the one it is currently on.
6. Kristina Vinson said she would not have missed a class at the same time she said Jay and Adnan were at her house, which showed that her recollection of what day Jay and Adnan had visited was wrong.
7. Because Jay had told numerous lies and versions of events to detectives, his testimony was only relied upon because the cell records and Vinson's testimony corroborated it. Without those, his testimony does not stand on its own. Thus, they could not have secured a conviction.
8. One of the lead detectives on the case engaged in egregious misconduct in another case, resulting in a wrongful conviction and 17 years of incarceration.
I listened this podcast when it first came out, so I’m probably misremembering this, but the key thing about the case to me was point 7:
They had detailed witness testimony which fit the evidence AND the witness was able to show the police the location of the victim’s car which backed up his story. So it is hard to explain another version of events where the witness was not actually involved in the crime. I’m curious if any of this new evidence points to him as being involved.
Even "great outcome for him" seems like a stretch. That podcast was six years ago. He has been in jail for 22 years, more than half of his life. It's hard to imagine where he goes with his life from here; I wish him the best of luck.
That's the "great" outcome of a one-in-a-million burst of publicity. Everybody else has it much, much worse.
There was a similar case in Italy regarding its own version of the 90s satanic panic, which led to dozens of kids separated from their parents, parents committing suicide from shame and grief, an overall travesty of justice. Until Pablo Trincia made a podcast out of it and conducted an investigation the case was considered closed. The podcast entirely overturned it two decades later, reuniting many of the kids (now adults) with their legally estranged parents and sending a bunch of people to jail for intentional malpractice: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/polis/2021/08/04/investigative-podca...
Periodically I go back and check on Mumia Abu Jamal. Yep, still in jail [previously, I had said "on death row"]. He had far more coverage but I guess it happened before things went viral.
He's no longer on death row for what it's worth. He was moved to gen pop in 2012. Still incarcerated, but not on death row.
" In 2011, the prosecution agreed to a sentence of life imprisonment without parole. He entered the general prison population early the following year."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumia_Abu-Jamal
I read the Wikipedia article on him, and I don't see why you think he's innocent? Other than an automatic assumption of racism there's nothing in there that would make me think it was a bad trial.
This isn't a case of mistaken identity - he was shot by the person he shot. He had a gun that had been discharged 5 times.
What am I missing? What's his explanation for having fired 5 times? All I saw was a vague claim that police shot him randomly as he crossed the street.
I didn't say I think he was innocent- I have no idea. My only point was that there was a "free mumia" movement that also pointed out problems with the legal case, such that there was no airtight prosecution that would have led to the resulting death penalty.
There is a third possibility, he pleads guilty to time served. He was a minor when the murder happened. He pleads, gets 25 years, with time served + good behavior, he never actually goes back to prison.
yes, this is what I meant. A no contest type of plea. He can say he is pleading guilty because he has spent 20+ years in prison and just wants to be/stay out, not that he is guilty. State can say he is guilty but he has spent 20+ years in prison so we are agreeing to this in order save taxpayer $ and move on.
I remember listening to Serial and thinking Adnan Syed's advocate Rabia Chaudry seemed more convinced of his innocence than he was. Like he was maintaining his innocence for his family then she came along and started pushing harder to get him out and he was along for the ride.
Victims don't always act as we might expect. So that might just be the way he is. Hopefully concrete proof will come out to say exactly who it was. I hope this for the family of Hae Min Lee. But is possible it never does.
I think the point of the podcast was to make a case that "probably did it" isn't enough for a life sentence.
Unfortunately I think many people are uncomfortable with the lack of closure behind such a situation, but that's another angle of our justice system more people should probably be conscious of.
“Phinn ruled that the state violated its legal obligation to share evidence that could have bolstered Syed’s defense. She ordered Syed to be placed on home detention with GPS location monitoring. The judge also said the state must decide whether to seek a new trial date or dismiss the case within 30 days.”
He wasn’t ruled innocent… there was something technically wrong with the trial proceedings.
