Hae Min Lee Case Study

The court system in the U.S. has one rule that rises above the rest when creating a fair verdict: innocent until proven guilty. Any defendant in court must be assumed innocent unless there is enough compelling evidence to assert a guilty verdict beyond a reasonable doubt. This rule, however, is not always followed. Every day, people are exonerated for crimes that they didn’t commit, and people are punished for something they had no part in. One case where this may have happened was the case of Hae Min Lee. More specifically, the case of the murder of Hae Min Lee, where an 18-year-old named Adnan Syed was found guilty. This case has recently come into the public eye via a podcast by the name of Serial. This podcast, hosted by a woman named Sarah …show more content…
A good explanation needs a good timeline of when and where everything happened. For Adnan—and the rest of the case—there is one twenty-one-minute stretch of time that is extremely important: 2:15 - 2:36 p.m. At 2:15, Hae and Adnan were dismissed from school. At 2:36, Hae was dead. The prosecution had an explanation for what happened in this timeframe that was, admittedly, quite simple. Adnan and Hae left school at 2:15, Hae bought some food from the school concession stand, Hae gave Adnan a ride, they went to the local Best Buy, Adnan strangled Hae in her car at the Best Buy, and Adnan called an acquaintance, named Jay, to come pick him up at 2:36. The entire murder in one nice, twenty-one-minute package. The team that runs Serial wanted to see if the timeline made any sense, so in “Episode 5: Route Talk,” they actually went out and played out the murder from 2:15 from 2:36 as the prosecution described it. The Serial team stated, “Twenty-two minutes and two seconds. Yeah we just did it in twenty-two minutes and two seconds. And that was leaving about a minute and a half in the car for the actual killing part… there’s no room for any errors. Any pauses even… [the events] all have to happen as quickly as they possibly can for the 2:36 call to work” (pg. 72 ). From this quote, it is clear that the Serial team are surprised by their results. The murder, as the prosecution explained it, simply …show more content…
One piece of evidence that the prosecution claimed corroborated their explanation is Adnan’s call logs. However, the fault in this evidence is two-fold. The first fault is with some of the calls themselves. Every call has a cell tower that it is connected to, and these cell towers can be used to trace someone's location. The problem arises as the calls from Adnan’s phone do not line up with where the prosecution claimed Adnan was. In Serial, “Episode 5: Route Talk,” Sarah Koenig mentions, “But here’s the problem. 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... none of these calls pinged a tower near where Jay tells the cops they were driving that afternoon.” (p. 75) With this quote, there is clearly a large stretch of time where the major piece of evidence corroborating the prosecution’s timeline suddenly contradicts the timeline altogether. Not only this, but the parts of the evidence that do support the prosecution in a major way are unreliable. In the case, a cell tower expert by the name of Abraham Waranowitz had testified that the cell tower records were correct. Now, as recently as October 2015, he has gone on to say that his statement was wrong, and that the records were not completely correct. Waranowitz, in his affidavit, states, “...AT&T had previously

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