Why the seeming certainty of Adnan's guilt on this board?

I don't believe you keep a kid in prison bc, hey, they didn't get it all right, but that doesn't mean they're wrong

Nobody does. They believe that a person goes to prison because a jury believes beyond a reasonable doubt that they committed murder, based on the evidence presented to the jury during trial.

As /u/xtrialatty repeatedly points out on this sub – the information presented by SK, CM, SS and RC is not subjected to cross-examination. I think this is probably the single most important thing that commenters on this subreddit continually overlook.

It is very easy to make a narrative convincing when you have 100% control over the narrative. A podcast or a blog is much different than a trial in terms of nudging an audience toward a viewpoint because there is no inherent adversarial format.

Imagine what Serial may have been like if there were another podcaster whose job was to convince listeners that Adnan was guilty; after every point SK makes in favor of his innocence, an equally persuasive journalist makes a competing argument. For every piece of technical evidence SK attempts to interpret, this other journalist interprets it in a different way, and presents their own experts who disagree with Koenig's.

It is not about black-and-white, or thinking about things in binary terms. On the contrary, I actually find that the "guilty" crowd seem to have far more empathy for the actual human beings involved in this story; seem to have spent far more time imagining what Jay, and Adnan, and Jenn, and Hae's family, and etc., must have been feeling; seem to be the people who most often call attention to the lack of respect or sanctity paid to Hae and her family (in fact, only the guilty crowd seem to be at all outraged over the enormous amounts of money that have been made exploiting this tragedy).

On the other hand, I see that the innocent crowd do tend to think in fairly binary terms. I see the common refrain "Jay is a liar!" all the time – as though "liar" is an innate trait, and liars only lie, and truth-tellers only tell the truth. This seems pretty divorced from a nuanced understanding of not just human behavior but the actual practice of law.

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