Haemin Lee's Case Against Sayed

In the late winter of 1999, a modern Romeo and Juliet story came alive in the city of Baltimore when a young girl, Haemin Lee, was strangled to death and buried deep in a national park. This chilling murder quickly drew the eyes of the detective to Lee’s ex boyfriend, Adnan Sayed. Sayed had dated Lee in the previous year, but Lee found interest in a different boy --Don. Hae and Adnan broke up a couple of months before Hae was murdered. Soon after they broke up, Hae began dating Don. This lead the Baltimore Police Department to believe that Sayed had committed the crime. Sayed was swiftly convicted of her murder, with the amount of effort the prosecution put to convicting a man instead of finding possible leads. With a careful review of

Sayed can be acquitted by looking at: Jay’s testimony, the time frame of the murder, and Adnan’s suspected motive. Firstly, the prosecution’s case against Sayed was built on the foundation of Jay’s testimony. Jay was a friend of Adnan and Hae at Woodland High School. Weeks after Hae went missing, Jay was interviewed by the police on several occasions. In the first interview, he confessed of knowing what had happened to Hae due to the fact that he was there to witness it all. In his testimony, he revealed that Adnan had strangled Hae to death at a Best Buy parking lot because Adnan was angry at the fact that Hae had besmirched his honor. Jay also gave the detectives’ concrete evidence to show that he was credible. The strongest evidence that he had provided them was the location of Hae’s missing car. When the detectives saw the Hae’s missing car at the location where Jay said it would be found,

This factor ties all the evidence together and shows the logic to why the person committed the crime. This factor is the motive of the crime. In Adnan’s case, the prosecution argued that Adnan’s motive to kill Hae was because Hae had made him sin greatly because they were dating when Adnan was not suppose to date. When Hae had broken up with Adnan, Adnan felt like he risked so much for Hae so breaking up left him destroyed and this pain would be even more felt when Hae started dating Don. The picture that the prosecution had chosen to portray shows not only Adnan as a jealous ex-boyfriend, but also as a overly-religous teen. However, looking at Adnan’s character and behavior shows the very polar opposite. According to many of Adnan and Hae’s friends, Adnan had actually been hooking up with other girls when they had broken up and he was also clubbing, smoking, drinking. These behaviors are condemned in Islam. Soon after Hae and Adnan broke up, Adnan also began talking to another girl name Nisha. These behaviors contradict the idea that Adnan was somehow overly-religious or even jealous of Don because an overly-religious teen would not smoke, drink, or hook-up with other people. Therefore, the motive that the prosecution had presented is not at all accurate or even conceivable when looking at Adnan’s behavior after Hae and Adnan broke up. Instead, this shows that not only is the