I think you're confusing me with someone who would have convicted a kid of murder on the testimony of someone who had lots to gain by lying, or someone who, like Asia, trusts the justice system to do their due diligence, or believes that anyone sitting at a defendant's table must be guilty of something, or someone who doesn't treat everything cops say or do, ever, with great suspicion, or believes that cops are demi-gods and not flawed human beings at best, or someone who is incapable of empathy for the accused, the misunderstood, the convicted criminal, or who believes that wrongful convictions are rare, or rarely reached by cops/prosecutors acting in bad faith.

I still wouldn't convict Adnan. There's basically no evidence for it, beyond Jays testimony, and what evidence there is is purely circumstantial. I think that if he did do it it was probably a crime of passion and, believe it or not, if he did, and it was, that he shouldn't spend the rest of his life in prison. I remain totally open to the possibility that he's completely innocent, but given what we do know, in order for that to be the case it's clear that there must be so, so much more that we don't know. The circumstantial evidence, more than implicating Adnan, just can't be assembled in such a way as to plausibly indict anyone else. So my satisfaction that he probably did it results from the ever-increasing implausibility that someone else could have done it AND make any sense of Jay's role in the cover-up and trial.

I don't have much sympathy for Jay, but I do feel for him (as a former Journalist who has also been the subject of reporting) when I see how naive and unsophisticated he's proven to be in the way he chose to get involved in the story. He would have been much better served to cooperate with Sarah in the first place -- but given that nobody knew how big Serial would become, it's understandable that he didn't. Still, he would have been smart to give an interview once it became clear how big it was getting. Unless you've experienced being the subject of a reported story -- as a willing participant or not -- you can't really understand how difficult and frustrating it can be, how misunderstood and misrepresented it can make you feel.

Our inner lives, the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of how our public lives unfold, entail so much cognitive dissonance, and are tacked together with countless convenient rationalizations. We allow these rationalizations to remain opaque to us, necessarily, for our own sanity, but they're almost always transparent to a good reporter doing her job in good faith. The result, often, is a kind of existential crisis, as those precariously assembled rationalizations tumble out into black and white, where -- often for the first time -- we have to face them, and then start the process of assimilating them once again. Most people just don't know how hard that can be. Subjects' reactions can manifest themselves in puzzling ways. ... So maybe, while we're stepping into people's shoes, it'd be helpful to think things through at least once giving Jay the benefit of the doubt, and see if that doesn't help make more sense of everything.