**Spoiler alert**

If you could go back to the day of a crime and reconstruct everything that happened, would you be able to figure out who the real killer is? More importantly, how would you make the judgment call? Would you be able to extract fact from memory, keep yourself free from prejudice and craft a narrative that’s truly beyond reasonable doubt?

These are some of the questions that have kept us hooked on Serial the past twelve weeks. The hit podcast follows journalist Sarah Koenig’s week-by-week investigation into the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee, an 18-year old student in Baltimore, Maryland. Her ex-boyfriend, Pakistani-American Adnan Syed, was charged with her murder and found guilty. He is still serving a life sentence in Baltimore. But Serial cast doubt on the prosecutor’s case, their star witness, and the effectiveness of Adnan’s defense attorney. Several weeks after the end of the podcast’s first season, the Maryland Court of Special Appeals filed a decision allowing Adnan to appeal his conviction.

Find out more about our conversation participants: Ahalya, Daniel, River, Tania

The Pride and Prejudice of Juries

River: Something I’ve been thinking about regarding this podcast and also the situations in Ferguson and Staten Island is: What is the deal with juries?

How is a jury supposed to know how to put together all the information presented in a long, complicated trial and make a decision?

I think I’m a pretty intelligent person used to dealing with complexity and staying focused for long periods of time and yet I really struggled to make sense of all the different, conflicting timelines presented in Serial. How in the world would a random person do it? Shouldn’t juries consist of policy makers, forensics experts, psychologists, lawyers and others trained to see through bullshit. It’s like trying to decide on climate change policy by asking the next 12 people I run into at the grocery store what their opinion is and then abiding by the majority view!

Daniel: River, you make a good point. Though I’m not a lawyer, I would guess that part of the reasoning is that it helps to have people who are not emotionally connected to those involved in the case give judgment. It then becomes absolutely imperative that all relevant information be presented.

Right after the first episode, I thought an alibi isn’t the only thing that could prove Adnan’s innocence. Find the real killer!

And clearly the state’s proclaimed motive is BS. So, in the end, we have no idea who killed Hae or why. Jay’s story, which the prosecutors relied on almost wholly, is just not reliable.

Ahalya: I agree—everything about Jay’s story is so fishy and I am flabbergasted that, despite his story not matching up with cell records for a swath of 6 hours the day of the murder and all the other inconsistencies, his version of events was still accepted at trial because the “big picture” sounded right. In a murder case like this, I would think the small details are so important…and yet here they were simply glossed over.

And the revelation in one of the later episodes that Adnan’s prosecutor was the one who found Jay a lawyer is crazy. I can’t believe the judge let that one go too. It seems like all the cards were stacked against Adnan.

Tania: I think, at least subconsciously, his Muslim background had a lot to do it. While there didn’t seem to be any overt prejudice from the jury against Adnan for being a Muslim, it is obvious that his parents being from Pakistan colored everything.

There is the general sense that this “Muslim man” went berserk from not being able to “control his woman” and therefore killed her out of pride and “honor.”

Some parts of the episode “Islamophobia” really pissed me off. What is deeply disturbing to me is not even the prejudice itself but the fact the many of the jurors felt it was a socially accepted feeling.

Ahalya: Yes, even if the jury was not overtly racist and didn’t consider themselves prejudiced, the negative associations with Pakistan, Islam and Muslim immigrants in general most definitely biased their perception of Adnan. It makes me angry too because it is just so unfair. The problem is this perception is near-universal and propagated by the media.

Once the prosecution started introducing words like “honor” and “pride” into their description of the case, I think that stuck in the jurors’ minds and that is all they could talk about with respect to Adnan’s alleged motive. They couldn’t divorce him, as a normal American teenager, from their fundamentalist, violent perception of Muslim men.

I think there may even have also been some prejudice against Adnan’s lawyer, Cristina Gutierrez, for different reasons. I acknowledge that she sounds loud and obnoxious at times in the trial hearings, but I think if she were a man, that would not have been an issue.

However, because she was an aggressive woman, I think she provoked a lot of unnecessarily negative feelings and comments. I’ve heard some theories that perhaps the jury decided so swiftly against Adnan because they didn’t want to hear her talk for any longer!

It’s scary how much perception and prejudice can really affect the outcome of a crucial trial like this and change people’s lives forever.

The best story wins

Tania: I wonder what people thought of the concluding episode. After being drowned with tiny little details of the day of the murder, I was left with a feeling that Adnan didn’t do it “beyond reasonable doubt.” I also wonder if his attorney was in denial over being in the early stages of MS.

The truth seems to be an elusive thing to come by and to some extent it seems that what matters is how well one can shape the narrative in court.

Daniel: You hit the nail on the head. That could explain why, despite the lack of hard facts, a jury still found Adnan guilty. Maybe most people in the jury never really approached it like detectives.

Detectives start with a wide net of suspects and narrow it down with new evidence. They start out with a number of possibilities.

And, assuming the TV shows I watch are somewhat like real life, there’s always a chance that new evidence comes to light and throws the top suspect off the list.

But sitting in the courtroom watching two lawyers, the jury could have thought they were really only given two choices. The question they were trying to answer was “Is Adnan guilty or not guilty?”

Given that question, their decision depended on which side, defense or prosecution, had the better story.

But that’s actually not the right question to ask.

I’m reminded of something I read in “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” where Robert Pirsig delves into the idea of “mu,” a Japanese term meaning “no thing.” It’s a term often used to answer questions that appear to only have two possible answers (yes/no, true/false). But there is always a third possible answer: “mu.” This response means that the situation is not always clearly delineated in black and white, that the question is flawed, and must ultimately be “un-asked.” This could explain why “the truth seems to be an elusive thing.” Attempting to answer the question with the limited choices it provides won’t capture the truth.

The first question we should ask ourselves on the jury is “Do we have enough evidence for a decision?” If so, only then do we go on to the guilty/not guilty question.

What Sarah Koenig and the experts (law enforcement/lawyers) point out is that there was not enough information to indict Adnan either way. Adnan could be guilty, but we don’t know enough. Adnan could be innocent, but we still don’t know enough.

If I was on the jury, I would say “I declare Adnan not guilty, not because I think he’s innocent, but because it’s not right for him to be in court at this time. Come back to me when you have more.”

Ahalya: I agree with you both. It really does all come down to the way the narrative was presented in court. As a litigation consultant, I can see this happening in practice.

In our cases we represent a side in a dispute and perform economic analysis to support that party’s case. In order to present that analysis effectively in court to a judge or a jury, the most important thing is to convey a compelling story. The minutiae of the analyses are less important—it’s how you weave them into a narrative that is key and will determine whether you win the case for your client or not.

In Adnan’s case, the theme was colored by racial prejudice, as the prosecutors presented this as an honor killing committed by a Muslim boy who was driven crazy by his girlfriend’s rejection. The defense didn’t have such a compelling story—Gutierrez presented several suspicious facts and inconsistencies in Jay’s testimony but didn’t weave them effectively enough into a narrative that displayed the glaring lack of consistent evidence against Adnan. Sarah Koenig did a much better job of that!

As a juror, I frankly couldn’t vote to convict Adnan either because I am filled with more than reasonable doubt.

Why there is no objective memory

In Sarah Koenig’s own words as she kicked off the podcast, this whole case hinges on Adnan’s memories of what he was doing for 20 minutes after school one cold, wintry day in January. If Adnan could just remember what he was doing that fateful afternoon it would have made all the difference—but even if he could remember, would that memory be trustworthy? How reliable are our own memories, especially when so much is at stake?

This NYTimes article, “Why our Memory Fails Us” is food for thought:

“When we recall our own memories, we are not extracting a perfect record of our experiences and playing it back verbatim. Most people believe that memory works this way, but it doesn’t. Instead, we are effectively whispering a message from our past to our present, reconstructing it on the fly each time. We get a lot of details right, but when our memories change, we only “hear” the most recent version of the message, and we may assume that what we believe now is what we always believed. Studies find that even our “flashbulb memories” of emotionally charged events can be distorted and inaccurate, but we cling to them with the greatest of confidence…We are all fabulists, and we must all get used to it.”

River: I completely echo the sentiments expressed by this article. We are creatures of meaning. Weaving things together to make something that supports some meaning that matters to us is natural. But when someone’s innocence is on the line, how do you pull all that apart? I am constantly surprised by how little I remember. I will totally forget entire swathes of time and events.

Part of why I’m so intrigued by Serial is the thought that if someone needed my testimony about some particular day, I would most likely have no clue what I did that day either.

Is that a bad thing? Am I just blowing through all these days without consciously experiencing them and storing them away as memories?

Maybe.

But I also recall a Time article years ago about memory. There were two people who represented the extremes of memory.

One man lost all memories before a certain year. He remembers his wife and his house but cannot formulate new memories. He would start reading a headline and forget about the start of it by the time he finished the line.

On the other extreme is a young woman who remembers every day in excruciating detail.  You can tell her a date and she can tell you what was on TV, what she ate, how she felt, what conversations she had, and so on.

What I found especially striking was how happy the man was and how very miserable the woman was.

She remembers everything. That means all those embarrassing, sad, angry moments we pick over but eventually forget are very present and intense for her. So she goes over them again and again. On the other hand, the man is content. Everything is new. Every sad moment is fleeting. Yet at the same time, is he really happy?

If you had to pick one extreme or the other, what would you pick and why?

Ahalya: I personally still feel regretful about a lot of things in my past so I think I would veer towards the extreme of the man who lost his memories. But at the same time, such a life would seem incomplete to me—I love to reminisce about the first time I met my husband or the day when I got into grad school…and of course, as I remember these happy events I tend to embellish and view them in a romantic light, which may not be the truth or how others remember them! But that’s still an important part of me that I would prefer to keep. That gets right back to the point of the article and the fact that we are all fabulists at heart.

We remember what we want to remember and create our own stories based on that.

In the case of Adnan Syed, Sarah Koenig makes the point that one probably cannot remember the events that took place on a regular day 15 years ago. Can you remember what you were doing on a mid-January day back in 1999? Probably not if nothing out of the ordinary happened.

But, if something memorable did occur, whether positive or negative, you are much more likely to recall your experiences and your memories instantly sharpen. I have a vivid personal experience like this.

When I was 12 years old, I went on summer vacation to India. Our flight was on a bright, sunny morning in mid-June. Ordinarily I wouldn’t remember any details of such a trip beyond the mundane. This day was different, however. We had a family friend come pick us up to give us a ride to the airport and when he arrived he looked exhausted. He helped pick up our suitcases and started carrying them towards the cab. But as soon as he got into the courtyard of our apartment building he stopped, dropped the suitcase and collapsed on the ground. He was having a heart attack. We called an ambulance and then his family right away, but because we were late for our flight we had to rush off to the airport while he was taken to the hospital. Throughout the duration of the 10-hour flight we couldn’t stop thinking about him and whether he was ok. Upon arrival in India my mother immediately called his family again and found out the awful news that he had passed away.

If this had just been a regular trip to India I wouldn’t have remembered any details of this day. But, because of the significant trauma that occurred, I find myself remembering many small details even now, almost 20 years later.

I remember that I was wearing a long sundress with a white t-shirt underneath and that my mother had on a diamond bracelet. I can’t remember any such minute details about the day before or the day after. But that day is thrown into sharp relief because of the gravity of what happened.

You would think that Adnan would remember similar details about the day of Hae’s disappearance. But if he truly is innocent, then it would have been just like any other day for him. And, as a result, it’s a huge stretch to think he could remember anything at all about it. Jay’s story has also shifted at least three or four times (even more so after his recent interviews with the Intercept).

At the end of the day, we twist our memories to suit our own version of events and it is such a subtle process that it is difficult to detect that.

Ultimately, that is why Serial was so fascinating and yet frustrating at the same time—it may be impossible to ever reconstruct the truth about that one day when Hae was murdered.

Tags:  crime memory morality prejudice race Serial