re: The Case Against Adnan Syed - HBO-

quote:

---

138 page Post Conviction opinion

The one I'm seeing is 92 pages.

---

The longer one is the court of Special Appeals opinion from 2016 that granted a new trial.

The one you link is the recent 2018 opinion from the highest state court, The Court of Appeals, that reversed that order.



It won’t let me copy and paste, but the relevant portion regarding the alibi witness is around page 28.

While the court found Adnan’s attorney WAS deficient in not investigating the claim, it also found that it was NOT prejudicial because it would not have changed the outcome and could have even hurt his case because her testimony conflicted with some of Adnan’s own statements.


This is key. While her statements may seem relevant and helpful as presented by these various productions, the court, which has access to the full record, actually found her credibility to be questionable (she offers to help him account for time “between 2 and 8 pm”, and conflict with Adnan’s own statements who said he didn’t leave school so would not have been at the public library that day.


The footnote from page 28 to 29 is especially damning to that testimony. It basically says even if Asia was called AND BELIEVED by the jury, it still doesn’t contradict the state’s evidence and merely means the timeline may have been off by a few minutes as she claims to have left at 240 and the state presented the murder to have occurred around 230.


The court also finds that her testimony could have actually been “problematic” for Adnan because it contradicts Adnan’s own version of events where he claimed he stuck to his normal routine of going to track practice after school that day, not going going to the library.


That’s another thing that bothers me in this discussion, when people fall victim to the CSI mindset that an exact time of death is not only possible to determine, but necessary.


I don’t remember all the details of the podcast about the timeline, but if a witness had claimed to have seen Adnan until 240, I highly doubt the State wouldn’t have been able to simply broaden the window for when the murder likely occurred.

The more exact timeline was later in the evening with the cell phone records showing the Adnan and Jay were together, in the area where the body was found, again evidence that contradicts Adnan’s version of events.