Adnan Judy Case Study

Memory is the recollection of what we see and experience in life. Usually, an individual will only remember every detail of a day if something significant happened that day. This applies to the case of Adnan Syed who has been in jail for 17 years as of today. What is the case? Where was Adnan Syed, a 17 year old , for 21 minutes after school on January 13, 1999. In this brief window of time his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, was murdered. Immediately, police contacted the most recent boyfriends of Hae Min Lee, Adnan and Don, with Adnan saying he was innocent and Don having an alibi. After Jay Wilds, a friend of Adnan, told police that Adnan had killed Hae and Jay had helped with the burying, Adnan was put to trial. The jury’s verdict, was a

A cell phone booth that Jay said Adnan used to call him never actually existed. Jay Wilds was the one who told the police about Adnan killing Hae Min Lee, and his story is their biggest piece of evidence in the prosecution against Adnan. Jay told police that after Adnan killed Hae, he called Jay from a Best Buy phone booth telling Jay to pick him up. When Sarah was following the route of Jay’s story she asked Best Buy managers and employees from that year if they knew of any phone booths and got these replies. “They dug up a photo of the store, from 2001, no phone booth or payphone, though lots of public phones did come down between ‘99 and 2001” (Episode 5, page 71). Without the phone booth there is no way that Adnan could have called Jay. If Adnan really did commit the murder, Jay would remember key details because as Sarah Koenig said, “If some significant event happened that day, you remember that, plus you remember the entire day much better” (Ep 1, p.3). Similarly, when speaking to a resident about the phone booth, Sarah received a decisive response,“There’s no, there was never any phones at Best Buy. There were never any phones around the Best Buy” says Laura Estrada Sandoval (Episode 9, page 129). With more than one person saying it, it is clear that there were no phones near Best Buy. In real life that is how things usually work out with testing

The cell records from Adnan’s match up with Jay’s story which show some truth in his story. When a person dials a number it pings a cell tower and leaves a cell record of the number dialed, when the call happened, and how long the call was. Sarah tells the listeners,“the prosecution’s story of the crime was mainly pinned to two things. Jay’s statements and the cell records.”(Ep 5, pg 73). The cell records were a big piece of the prosecution, so big that they mentioned it at court several times. Usually, when someone want to prove a point they want to have more than one good evidence. Although the cell records work in the prosecution’s favor, the cell towers show that there is no way that Adnan could be at the places Jay said he was at. Similarly, when Sarah was going through the route of the crime she realized this.”It doesn’t match the cell tower in the call record. It’s pinging a tower back near the Best Buy, west of where we are. And that is true of all these calls from the middle of the afternoon“ (Episode 5, Page 75). The cell towers help show where the call was taken from, and it is okay if one part of his story didn’t match with the cell towers, but all of the calls from the middle of the afternoon didn’t match the cell tower. Usually when more than one of the same bad thing happens it rings an alarm like hey maybe this isn’t the truth. For the