Adnan Syed was arrested February, 2000, on the account of first-degree murder. Hae Min Lee, a young Korean high schooler who dated Syed for around 9 months, was the victim of this heinous crime. He was sentenced to life plus 30 years in prison and  remains incarcerated to this day. The case against him doesn’t quite add up, with plenty of empty holes, and people, including myself, wonder whether if he is rightly imprisoned, or innocent and incarcerated. With a lack of a substantial case, Adnan Syed cannot be legitimately charged for this crime; there is one story presented with plenty of discrepancies, no physical evidence, and facts we know today that back him up.

Jay Wilds told the story of Hae Min’s murder, but unfortunately, the story has obvious indescrepencies. In his later stories, he contradicts himself, and his timeline was checked by Koenig or other sources and proven lies. In Jay’s original story, he and Adnan had gone to a mall together, and this was when Adnan first told Jay he wanted to kill Hae on the day of the murder. He was quick to lie, because two weeks later, Jay told police that Adnan told him in previous days he wanted to kill Hae. Adnan’s car and phone were then left Jay the whole day until he called again and told him “that bitch is dead. Come get me. I’m at Best Buy.” This was around 2:30 pm, when the body was seen for the first time. They proceed to go back and drop Adnan at track practice to establish an alibi. Jay then picks up Adnan and takes him to Leakin Park, where they bury Hae around 7:00 pm. Jay was a private person, especially when it came to the police. He was selling a lot of weed and felt unsafe talking to the police at first. In his new story, he says that the Best Buy was where Adnan called him to tell him that he killed Hae, but he didn’t see her body until much later. “I saw her body later, in front of of my grandmother’s house where I was living. I didn’t tell the cops it was in front of my house because I didn’t want to involve my grandmother.” In this new story, Adnan and Jay had left Hae’s body in her car until they were ready to bury her at around 12:00 am later that night in the park. In Serial, many of Jay's friends were interviewed to determine and analyse Jay’s intentions in testifying against Adnan and who he was as a person. One of the main topics that his high school friends repeated was that he was a liar. Even Jim Trainum, a detective, doesn’t believe Jay’s version of the story; he believes that “there is a lot more to it than that. I feel that he’s definitely minimizing his involvement.” Jay continues to be an unreliable source to this day because of the stories indescrepencies, that Adnan today wouldn’t be able to get charged with this crime.

The cell phone records are one of the only pieces of evidence in which the court used to prove Adnan guilty, yet the cell records don’t necessarily show that Adnan committed the murder. The call log is resourceful to help paint the picture of their night, but many calls, except for the call to Nisha, are not incriminating for Adnan. The first call to Jay is at 10:45 am, when he originally picks up Adnan's phone and car. Later that day, a few calls go to Jenn, Nisha, Phil, and Patrick, all very close to the time Jay said he killed Hae. Jenn, Patrick, and Phil are all only  friends of Jay, not Adnan. Jenn was called twice, once before the murder, and once after. Not too soon after the calls to Jenn, two calls were placed to Adnan's phone and pinged close to Leakin Park, but what seems to be a slip up in court could have maybe saved Adnan from 20 years in prison, because those calls were incoming, and couldn’t have been used as legitimate evidence for use in court. The route that needed to be taken to fulfill the storyboard that the cell records made is almost impossible. Sarah Koenig tried herself to see if she could commit the crime with that timeline, and barely succeeded. She also didn’t wait the full three minutes she needed to when accounting for the time in which Hae would have been strangled. The cell records are still a huge part of the investigation today, but overall, do not prove Adnan to be guilty, but rather, innocent.

What we know now, after Serial officially ended, helps prove Adnan’s innocence even more. The podcast Undisclosed got deep into details showing Adnan's innocence, and they noticed while relistening to the interviews with Jay during his second trial that there was a tapping in the background. It seemed to the listeners to be the police pointing out different places and times, helping Jay keep his story within the timeline, because seconds after each tap, Jay seemed to recollect the event instantly, indicating he lied many times to the jury. The biggest and most substantial pieces of new evidence are the forensics of Hae’s body. Hae wasn’t in fact buried after the murder took place, because the lividity within her blood, when the heart stops and blood begins to settle into the tissue at the lowest point in a body, which turned out to be on Hae’s stomach and nowhere else, meaning she must have been laying on her stomach. Jay stated that Hae was left in the back of the car, only around 5 hours before burial, which is not enough time for lividity to fully form. Not only is it not long enough for the lividity to form, but Jay even stated that “he popped the trunk and I saw Hae’s body. She looked kinda purple, blue, her legs were tucked behind her, she had stockings on, none of her clothes were removed, nothing like that,” meaning she wasn’t even on her stomach. With this new information, it means that Hae was dead for around 8-12 hours, left on her stomach, before being buried on her side in Leakin Park. All this new information is extremely relevant to his case, and shows that Jay still has not told his whole story and is still lying.

While Adnan’s case has been controversial, I firmly believe that he was incarcerated illegitimately. The prosecution has no firm and true evidence to show he is guilty, and Jay has clearly told many lies, making him an unreliable source and his story up for question. Adnan’s character is also extremely sweet, kind, hard working and overall a very good person. Through all these years in jail he hasn’t once gotten in trouble, except for having a cell phone, and has been an exemplary inmate overall, along with his family still sticking with him through it all. Adnan does not deserve to be in jail, and it is not fair to him, his family, or his friends that he has been gone for all these years.