Last spring, Adnan sent me a letter about ... something, I cant even remember exactly what. But it included these two graphs that hed drawn out in pencil. With no explanation. There was just a Post-it attached to the back of one of the papers that said: Could you please hold these 2 pages until we next speak? Thank you.
Heres what he sent:
Price of tea at 7-11
Price of tea at C-Mart
This was curious. It crossed my mind that Adnan might be
off his rocker in some way. Or, more excitingly, that these graphs were code for some top-secret information too dangerous for him to send in a letter.
But no. These graphs were a riddle that I would fail to solve when we next spoke, a couple of days later.
Adnan: Now, so would you prefer, as a consumer, would you rather purchase at a store where prices are consistent or items from a store where the prices fluctuate?
Sarah: I would prefer consistency.
Adnan: That makes sense. Especially in todays economy. So if you had to choose, which store would you say has more consistent prices?
Sarah: 7-11 is definitely more consistent.
Adnan: As compared to
?
Sarah: As compared to C-Mart, which is going way up and down.
Look again, Adnan said. Right. Their prices are exactly the same. Its just that the graph of C-Mart prices is zoomed way in the y-axis is in much smaller cost increments so it looks like dramatic fluctuations are happening. And he made the pencil lines much darker and more striking in the C-Mart graph, so it looks more...sinister or something.
This was Adnans point: See how easy it is to look at the same information, but, depending on how its presented, come to two different conclusions about what it means? The 7-11 graph is the innocent graph. The C-Mart graph is the guilty graph. But they contain the same information.
Adnan says hes thought about this a lot in relation to his own case, and hes always been baffled by it; how some people (the jurors) sat through the trial and heard one thing, and others (his family, his lawyers, his friends) sat through it and heard the opposite.
"I read a book about a prosecutor who said its not always about innocent or guilty, its about who can persuade the jury, Adnan said. And theyre not being dishonest nothing about that graph is dishonest but its kind of misleading. Its darker, its zoomed in, the heading is underlined. Everything about it is misleading, but its true information.
"When I first came [to prison], I was naïve to the law, to prison life, to a lot of things," he said. "Now that Im older, I see guys naïve to the law coming in. I use this graph to illustrate it. Probably people here say, 'Oh my god, Syed showed you that damn graph, didnt he?' And Im like, 'No it proves a point!' It proves a good point. So Im kinda infamous for those graphs.
By the time Im done with this story, Im hoping Ill have plotted my own tea graph - without undue spin from C-Mart, or 7-11.