Adnan's Argumentative Essay: A Time For Justice

A Time For Justice

The fate of your future is in someone else's hands based off a murder that doesn't align and a case that is full of holes. That’s how it was for Adnan Syed, anyway. In 1999, a teenage boy was convicted of murdering his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, and was sentenced to a lifetime in prison. Close to eighteen years later, the facts of the case have been thoroughly considered. Adnan should get a retrial because there is too much reasonable doubt and Adnan had an ineffective lawyer.

There was too much reasonable doubt throughout Adnan's entire case, and not nearly enough hard evidence to convict the boy of this murder. The verdict of the case was decided because of two things: Jay’s story and the cell phone records. Both of

This was the case with Adnan; the jury only spent about two hours deliberating the complicated case, and a large reason for that could be that most already assumed he was guilty without taking into consideration what little they actually knew about the case (Vice News). In Serial, Sarah says “as a person, I have doubts... I feel like shaking everyone by the shoulders like an aggravated cop. Just tell me the facts, ma’am, because we didn't have them fifteen years ago and we still don't have them now” (“What We Know”). The doubt expressed by Sarah about the guilt of Adnan leads us to believe that this case should not have ended the way it did because of the lack of true knowledge, eighteen years ago and now. Recently over a period of time, Mr. Syed and his legal team have “presented new evidence,

However, these records are an hour off of Jay’s story so they don’t match up (“The Opposite of the Prosecution”). Along with the phone records, the towers the calls pinged aren't in the location that Jay said he and Adnan were at the time. That leads us to the only real piece of evidence against Adnan, which was Jay being able to lead the police to Hae’s car. Sending a 17-year-old boy to prison for life because of that one piece of evidence is immoral, especially when there are so many other pieces that don't fit. We have learned that Serial is not only a murder mystery, but more of a “deep exploration of the concept of reasonable doubt, and therefore an exposé of the terrible flaws in our justice system” (The New Yorker). This means that the justice system made a mistake in declaring Adnan as guilty because there was too much reasonable doubt that they could not find answers