re: The Case Against Adnan Syed - HBO-

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Plea Agreement

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Oh right, so he did two years in DOC?


I mean, for everyone claiming the police fed him info about the car, why would he play along knowing he was going away for years if he really wasn’t a part of it??


Is it because they think they had him on drug charges?

Doubtful he’d be doing any more time unless he was a major distributor.

Why throw your friend under the bus for something he didn’t do if you’re going away anyway?



I mean, the guy did two years, at least, in the Department of Corrections. Not like he was getting away with a slap on the wrist.

Really makes the idea that he was fed info pretty much absurd.

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A 138 page Post Conviction opinion

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The one I'm seeing is 92 pages. Here --> State v. Syed -- MD Ct. App. Opinion

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The system of a jury of one’s peers is a guiding principle designed to provide protection from the corruption and tyranny so many seem to think is rampant in the criminal justice system.

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The jury system is a fundamental tenet of the american justice system. Unfortunately, on the federal side, jury trials are going the way of the do do bird (because, for reasons outside the scope of this discussion, a defendant is often much worse off on the sentencing front if he elects to have his trial before a jury and is found guilty). But this is a state case, and jury trials are still common things in most state court criminal proceedings, and for good reason. You are much more likely to be acquitted by a jury than by a judge. If you're on trial for murder, you go for a jury trial every day of the week.

And, yes, appellate courts do give great deference to the factfinder of the trial court on issues of fact. But the issue on appeal here is whether the information that WASN'T presented to the jury was significant enough that it might have been outcome determinative. I'm not about to read that entire opinion, but I actually think a higher appellate court overruling a lower appellate court in a 4-3 decision on a question like that is somewhere between questionable and quite questionable.

So, even though I would have voted guilty if I would have been on that jury, I would have voted to give him a new trial if I were on the appellate court that ruled against him. To say that an alibi witness clearly wouldn't have changed the jury's decision is bollocks. Maybe it would have, maybe it wouldn't have, but that's the kind of evidence that certainly might have been outcome determinative. Thumbs down to those 4 appellate judges.

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138 page Post Conviction opinion

The one I'm seeing is 92 pages.

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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.

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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.

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It's been awhile since I listened to the podcast and did the whole internet sleuthing thing. But I want to say I remember the timeline being important because Adnan had track practice that day. If he was late then there was some kind of punishment or record and nobody remembers anything like that. To push the murder back would start really screwing with that.

Again, I may be completely off base here and remembering this wrong. Hopefully the HBO doc covers the timeline in detail. I read that Episode 2 is a lot of back and forth with the inconsistencies of testimony and facts.

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Again, I may be completely off base here and remembering this wrong. Hopefully the HBO doc covers the timeline in detail. I read that Episode 2 is a lot of back and forth with the inconsistencies of testimony and facts.

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I hope they cover the entire timeline of the pinging of cellphone towers. That entire deal always seemed sketchy. Then Jay's story about meeting him at Bestbuy/the phone call at bestbuy didn't mesh well either.

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Oh right, so he did two years in DOC?

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He did not go to prison for any involvement in the Hae Lee murder.

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He did not go to prison for any involvement in the Hae Lee murder.

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I’m just reading off of the plea agreement that other poster linked.

It says in exchange for his testimony he will enter a guilty plea to Acessory After the Fact and State will recommend 5 years suspend all but 2.


LINK


Like I said it’s been years since I listened and read all of this stuff.

Did that plea not go through?

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Also, I still find Alonzo Sellers story sketchy.

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This is a red herring.

Sellers simply found the body a month after she went missing. There is no other connection to him and the murder.


He certainly wasn’t in Leakin Park to “have a beer” as he claims. That was a dangerous and sketchy place and all manner of bad things happened there, mostly at night. Drugs, prostitution (of any and all predilection), gang activity.

So no, he likely wasn’t truthful about why he was there, but the fact that he called the police at all opening himself up to scrutiny shows just how shocked he must have been when he stumbled upon the body.


Again, that is what good defense counsel does. Focus on anything other than the defendant to create doubt in the minds of the jury. And these producers do the same to keep the audience feeling as though there are too many questions unanswered, even if they have nothing to do with the ultimate issue.

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He certainly wasn’t in Leakin Park to “have a beer” as he claims. That was a dangerous and sketchy place and all manner of bad things happened there, mostly at night. Drugs, prostitution (of any and all predilection), gang activity.

So no, he likely wasn’t truthful about why he was there, but the fact that he called the police at all opening himself up to scrutiny shows just how shocked he must have been when he stumbled upon the body.

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So, do you think he found the body sometime at night, and then waited and called the police at a later time? His story is just odd and doesn't make any sense.