In an attempt to gain more concrete answers about the case at this point in time, I looked up the public’s response to this episode, and came across this interesting reddit feed about people’s thoughts (http://www.reddit.com/r/serialpodcast/comments/2k2s28/official_discussion_serial_episode_5_route_talk/)
Probably one of the most interesting aspects about this is about the number of calls that Adnan received on his phone. On the 13th of January, 1999, Adnan received and made 34 total calls on his cell phone (assuming he had control over his phone calls the entirety of the day). We know that Adnan says he left his phone with Jay for a certain amount of time, so some of these calls could have been made by Jay, and some were apparently made by Adnan to his own phone, alerting Jay to come pick him up. This many phone calls seems rather astonishing, or irregular. Thinking about my call history nowadays, I probably call on average 1 or 2 people a day, not anywhere near the 34 in Adnan’s phone record.
But what one Reddit person brought up was interesting: Back in 1999, texting wasn’t even a thing? So of the few people who even had cell phones, making random trivial phone calls numerous times throughout the day, even to call someone across the hallway from you at school wasn’t so uncommon. This would make sense considering how now with texting, people seem to text other people who are even in the same building or same room as them, on a frequent basis. The irregular number of calls doesn’t become so suspicious anymore to me after hearing this information. What is weird though is how we can never really compare Adnan's history of calls to his prior calling history because he (Adnan) got his phone two days prior to the disappearance of Hae…so though we can assume that this number of calls could be normal, we can never really compare against anything Adnan had previously done.
What is really frustrating, especially for Adnan, is how it seems that almost none of what Jay has told matches up with the cell records talked about at trial. Also, since cell phones were so limited in 1999, how is it that someone could “forget” whether or not there was a phone booth in a certain location, if that would have been the main means of them communicating others without possessing a cell phone?
Finally, I think it is really interesting how one of the previous episodes sets us up to believe that Adnan and Jay weren’t even that good of friends, but from this episode, we get the idea that even though they may not have been the best of friends, they were definitely heavily involved with each other / trustworthy of each other / somehow criminally linked to even be talking about this now. Maybe they were extremely affiliated with each other, especially concerning Hae’s murder, and Jay doesn’t want that affiliation anymore so by setting up this idea of distance between he and Adnan, he can set up a alibi and potentially cover up any actions he may have played in her murder.
A lot of this episode looks bad for Adnan, especially where the cell phone pings lead to Leakin Park, so I wonder how this story progresses from here...
I think you bring up a really interesting point about the number of calls Adnan makes throughout the day. When I first heard the number 34, I was surprised. To me, that number seemed almost to incriminate Adnan because how could an average day merit 34 phone calls? I thought something else had to be going on. But it is true, texting did not exist then, so people relied more on phone calls to communicate. You said it would be interesting to know the average number of calls a person would make per day in 1999, and I thought so too. So I looked it up. And while I couldn’t find the average call number for 1999, I found out the average number of calls per day for the year 1997. According to PBS, the average number of calls a person would make per day in 1997 was 6.4. This number is drastically lower than the 34 Adnan makes. Granted, this data is for 1997 not 1999, and it does not specify what types of phone calls these were—landline, payphone, or cell phone—the 6.4 average makes Adnan’s telephone activity look suspicious.
ReplyDeleteBut again, who is to say that Adnan was making all of these calls? Adnan admits that Jay probably had a hold of his cell phone during the day. Jay very well could be behind a large number of these calls. Who knows? It’s hard to tell with the timeline the State has extracted from Jay’s testimony. And here, another problem emerges. This one has to do with the legal system. Here the State has two big pieces of evidence: Jay’s testimony and the cell phone records. Each of these pieces of evidence is susceptible to mistakes. Jay’s memory of the day could change over time, and cell phone records, as Koenig says, are not entirely accurate when it comes to pinpointing the location from which a call was made. The State put Adnan away based on these two shaky pieces of evidence, trying to mold them into one coherent narrative. There is just so much room for error, it is hard to believe that based on the State’s evidence, a jury would find Adnan guilty without reasonable doubt. Because whether or not Adnan did it, I think the cell records paired up with Jay’s testimony present at least some degree of reasonable doubt.
Here is the link to the PBS phone call study:
(http://www.pbs.org/fmc/book/15communication5.htm)