Adnan Syed Trial Reasoning Process Discussion Choose 3 of the questions to answer in essay format Be sure to include in-text citations where appropriate a

Adnan Syed Trial Reasoning Process Discussion Choose 3 of the questions to answer in essay format

Be sure to include in-text citations where appropriate and to cite the textbook as a reference in APA format at the end of your paper

the book is Chaffee, J. (2019). Thinking critically. Boston: Cengage Learning, (89-92)

Pages are in the files below:

1.After reading the initial description of the Adnan Syed trial, would you have found him “guilty” or “not guilty” had you been a member of the jury? Explain the reasoning process that would have led you to that conclusion.

2. In her article, “The Immigrant Bias: Reflecting on Serial” Amy R. Grenier argues that anti-Muslim prejudice not only influenced the police investigation of Syed, but was also used by the prosecutors in a direct attempt to manipulate the jurors’ impressions. Do you think that this is accurate? Why? Is this kind of behavior from the prosecution a requirement of their job?

3. Goleman identifies a number of errors in reasoning that can lead jurors to illogical or unsubstantiated conclusions in their deliberations. Explain which of the following errors in reasoning might have been committed by the Adnan Syed jurors:

4. Explain whether you believe that the research strategies lawyers use to select the “right” juries for their cases undermine the fairness of the justice system. Should jurors be questioned about their prejudices, as Grenier believes?

5. What role, if any, do you think prejudice plays in the criminal justice system? What tools can critical thinking offer to help lessen the effect of prejudice?

6. In what way have reading and reflecting on these questions influenced your original conclusion regarding whether Adnan Syed should have been found “guilty” or “not guilty”? Do you believe that the standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt was met in Syed’s case? Do you think that he was guilty of murdering Lee? Explain your reasoning process in answering both questions. The Immigrant Bias: Reflecting on Serial
by Amy R. Grenier
[Adnan Syed’s] trial and conviction raises interesting questions about how the American justice system treats immigrants, even second-generation immigrants who are U.S. citizens. Learning about Adnan’s situation through
Serial left me with the primary question of whether or not it is possible for members of the immigrant community to receive a fair trial in the United States.
While Adnan is a U.S. citizen (and repeatedly described as an average American teenager), his parents are Pakistani immigrants. Adnan’s mother (not surprisingly) believes in his innocence, and, as Sarah Koenig put it, “She
believes her son is innocent, that anti-Muslim prejudice is the reason he was arrested, and that everyone in the local Muslim community feels the same way.” Koenig somewhat scoffs at this idea – that racism was the cause of
Adnan’s arrest, however, she did find casual racism throughout case, including from the jurors, the supporting research the police used, and the prosecution.
This casual racism and xenophobia within the jury manifested in the form of the “otherness” of Adnan’s perceived culture. Juror William Owens, in an interview with Koenig, stated, “I don’t feel religion was why he did what he
did. It may have been culture, but I don’t think it was religion. I’m not sure how the cultures over there, how they treat their women he just wanted control and she wouldn’t give it to him.” Another juror, Stella Armstrong, said
that when the jury was deliberating, it came up that in Arab culture, men rule, not women. The sixth amendment of the American Constitution “guarantees the rights of criminal defendants, including … the right to an impartial
jury.” It’s hard to walk away from quotes such as those from the jurors that convicted Adnan and feel like they were “impartial.”
2Sarah Larson, “What Serial Really Taught Us,” The New Yorker, December 18, 2014.
The investigation may have been biased against Adnan as well. One of the sources of research for the police-one which Koenig has no way of knowing how or if it impacted the detectives-was a report done by a consultant
titled “Report on Islamic Thought and Culture with Emphasis on Pakistan.” The report stated that “For her to have another man dishonored both Anan Sayed and his belief structure. It is acceptable for a Muslim man to control the
actions of a woman by completely eliminating her. Within this harsh culture, he has not violated any code, he has defended his honor.” And, “…for many ethnic Pakistanis, incidents like this are common place, and in Pakistan this
would not have been a crime but probably a question of honor.”
This approach to his heritage, with an emphasis on honor, carried over to the prosecution and was expressed in both the bail hearing and the second trial (after the first ended in a mistrial). At a March 1999 bail hearing, the
prosecutor fabricated a story about a pattern in the United States of Pakistani men killing their jilted lovers and then escaping to Pakistan where they can’t be extradited-a statement she later retracted in an apology letter to the
judge. In his opening statement at trial, Prosecutor Kevin Urick argued that, “He became enraged. He felt betrayed that his honor had been besmirched, and he became very angry, and he set out to kill Hae Min Lee.” The
prosecution also focused a lot on Islam and dating, putting a religious spin on the age old “former lover” motive for murder. And, as attorney Rabia Chaudry, who initially brought Adnan’s case to Koenig, bluntly puts it: “It’s not
uncommon in the murders of women that law enforcement will look at current or former partners. The State had no reason to spend time at trial examining religious practices other than to color Adnan in a bigoted way without
overtly articulating it.”
In an effort to push back against this, defense attorney Cristina Gutierrez spent what Koenig described as a “nutty” amount of time on Adnan’s immigration status in her opening statement at the first trial, emphasizing, “Adnan
Masud Syed is an American citizen. He was born in this country, like most American citizens.” However, given the focus on his “otherness” by the prosecution and jury, Adnan’s citizenship did not seem to matter.
But does this sort of casual racism exist in a manner that hinders justice in the wider American court system? Cornell law professors Kevin Clermont and Theodore Eisenberg argued in a 2007 journal article that “foreigners do
not fare poorly in federal courts-indeed, they have outperformed their domestic counterparts,” concluding that “the data offer no support for the existence of xenophobic bias in U.S. courts.” While their data includes both jury and
judge trials, it appears to focus on federal civil trials-not criminal trials-and included foreigners of all perceived races and cultural backgrounds. Some studies, which focus primarily on white-black racial dynamics, have
demonstrated that a small but significant racial bias effect exists for both verdict and sentencing decision.” However, mock trials using Middle Eastern names and garb for the defendant had a more mixed result that showed that
“the effects of racial bias may have been mediated by deliberation.” In contrast, jury consultants from the National Jury Project found that anti-Muslim and anti-Arab prejudice is rife regardless of the case” and they argue for the
use of a juror questionnaire to help identify these possible prejudices.
A 1981 Supreme Court case about questions asked of jurors, Rosales-Lopez v. United States established somewhat of a standard for jury composition. In Rosales-Lopez, a Mexican immigrant asked the judge to ask a
question about prejudice against Mexicans during jury selection. The judge did not, and Rosales-Lopez’ suit ensued after his conviction, pursuing a reversible error. However, the Supreme Court held that in federal courts at least,
…failure to honor a defendant’s request to inquire into racial or ethnic prejudice, where such an inquiry is not constitutionally mandated, is a reversible error only where the circumstances of the case indicate a “reasonable
possibility” that such prejudice might influence the jury. Federal trial courts must make such an inquiry when requested by a defendant accused of a violent crime and where the defendant and the victim are members of
different racial or ethnic groups.
I’m unsure of the extent of the questions asked of jurors in Adnan’s case, and whether or not Rosales-Lopez came into play in his situation. In recent years, however, some judges have acted to prevent possible discrimination
against immigrants through questioning potential jurors, something that may have helped Adnan if it was not done during his jury selection process. In 2012, a judge in Oregon asked during the jury selections for murder trials
where the defendants were immigrants, “Do you believe that immigrants are causing problems in America?” The judge cited Rosales-Lopez directly, saying “he believed it was his responsibility to address racial or ethnic prejudice
to ensure the defendant received a fair and impartial trial.”
As The Atlantic observed, “Whether or not Adnan is guilty, it’s difficult to come away from this deep dive into his case without concluding that he would’ve gotten a fairer trial in ways big and small if he had not been a Muslim.”
At the end of the day, witnesses, juries, prosecutors, judges—the very people who compose our justice system are just that-people. People with prejudices, big and small. People who compose a wider society with broader
assumptions about social groups, Muslims and immigrants included—that must be mitigated through a judicial process that recognizes these prejudices.
Hopefully someday a juror won’t speak of a teenage kid from the Baltimore suburbs with the words “I’m not sure how the cultures over there, how they treat their women” without realizing he means the very American culture
the defendant grew up with.
Ms. Grenier is a former Law Clerk in the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Immigration Litigation Appellate Section, and currently works with the Department of Homeland Security, Office of Policy, Border Immigration and
Trade.
Source: © 2015 Amy R. Grenier. https://themigrationist.net/2015/01/14/the-immigrant-bias-reflecting-on-serial).
QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS
1. After reading the initial description of the Adnan Syed trial, would you have found him “guilty” or “not guilty” had you been a member of the jury? Explain the reasoning process that would have led you to that conclusion.
2. In her article, “The Immigrant Bias: Reflecting on Serial” Amy R. Grenier argues that anti-Muslim prejudice not only influenced the police investigation of Syed, but was also used by the prosecutors in a direct attempt to
manipulate the jurors’ impressions. Do you think that this is accurate? Why? Is this kind of behavior from the prosecution a requirement of their job?
3. Goleman identifies a number of errors in reasoning that can lead jurors to illogical or unsubstantiated conclusions in their deliberations. Explain which of the following errors in reasoning might have been committed by the
Adnan Syed jurors:
Storytelling: Instead of listening to all of the evidence and then weighing it at the end, many jurors compose a story early on in the trial that makes sense of what they are hearing. The problem is that this may lead to
“confirmation bias”-looking for information that supports their story and disregarding information that conflicts with their story.
Filling in the blanks: Jurors often inject information, inferences, and assumptions that were not included in the trial testimony because they—perhaps unconsciously-want to fill out their story in a way that is consistent
with the conclusion they have already reached.
Backgrounds: Jurors’ backgrounds can often lead to crucial differences in the assumptions they bring to their explanatory stories, which might in turn be illogical, unsubstantiated, or in contradiction with the known
facts.
4. Explain whether you believe that the research strategies lawyers use to select the “right” juries for their cases undermine the fairness of the justice system. Should jurors be questioned about their prejudices, as Grenier
believes?
5. What role, if any, do you think prejudice plays in the criminal justice system? What tools can critical thinking offer to help lessen the effect of prejudice?
6. In what way have reading and reflecting on these questions influenced your original conclusion regarding whether Adnan Syed should have been found “guilty” or “not guilty”? Do you believe that the standard of proof
beyond a reasonable doubt was met in Syed’s case? Do you think that he was guilty of murdering Lee? Explain your reasoning process in answering both questions.
CASEBOOK: THE SERIAL PODCAST AND THE ADNAN SYED TRIAL
Adnan Syed’s trial, which took place from January to February 2000, became famous after the journalist Sarah Koenig began reinvestigating the case for her pod-cast Serial, a spin-off of the popular NPR podcast This American
Life. Though the weekly episodes were produced to sound like a murder mystery, the Serial podcast became a meditation on the idea of reasonable doubt.
The case centered on what happened to Baltimore County, Maryland, high school senior Hae Min Lee, a popular student-athlete, after she disappeared the afternoon of January 13, 1999. When her body was discovered in a
city park a month after her disappearance, police determined that she had been strangled. Adnan Syed, Lee’s ex-boyfriend, was arrested and eventually convicted of her murder, despite his insistence that he had nothing to do
with Lee’s death and had neither motive nor opportunity to kill her. The case against him was largely based on the testimony of one witness, Jay Wilds, a friend of Syed’s who claimed he helped bury Lee’s body. Even though
Wilds was a known drug dealer whose own friends testified to rarely believing his frequent tall tales, police and prosecutors overlooked his inconsistent, confusing statements after he was able to lead them to Lee’s abandoned
car. Police did not investigate whether Wilds may have known the location of Lee’s car for other reasons, or whether he may have been the murderer himself. From their perspective, Wilds’ testimony became proof beyond a
reasonable doubt.
Source: “Jurors Hear Evidence and Turn It into Stories,” by Daniel Goleman, The New York Times, May 12, 1992. Copyright © 1992 by The New York Times Co. Reprinted with permission.
Sarah Koenig, however, was not convinced. In the process of researching the Serial podcast, Koenig and her team of reporters poured over every detail of the case: the alibis, the defense, the cell phone calls, the timeline, the
witnesses, the friends and family, and the jurors. She uncovered not only an alibi witness for Syed, whose phone calls and letters his original defense team had failed to return; she also found evidence to justify serious concerns
that anti-Muslim prejudice may have played a part in Syed’s conviction. Despite Wilds’ testimony, Koenig argues that the prosecution did not prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt. As Alan M. Dershowitz explains the
concept of reasonable doubt, “even if it is likely’ or ‘probable’ that a defendant committed the murder, he must be acquitted, because neither likely nor probable satisfies the daunting standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt”
What Koenig suggests-after overcoming some initial skepticism is that anti-Muslim prejudice may have erased doubt in the minds of police and jurors who would not have been convinced by Wilds’ version of events alone had
Syed been white and Christian. In suggesting this, Koenig exposes a well-known but serious flaw in our criminal justice system-a flaw that can only be overcome through careful critical thinking. This flaw is our temptation, as
Sarah Larson put it, “to convict people who haven’t been proved guilty because we feel that they are guilty”? The following article by Amy R. Grenier explores the degree to which anti-Muslim prejudice may–or may not-have
influenced Syed’s conviction. As you read it, be aware of your own reasoning process as you work to discover not just whether the standard of reasonable doubt had been met in Syed’s case, but what role, if any, prejudice plays
in the criminal justice system as a whole.

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