(incoming wall of text)
So I managed to finish late last week and collect my thoughts:
1. First off, I want to say Sarah Koening did a fantastic job with this. Certainly not perfect, but still the overall concept and presentation were really groundbreaking and innovative, and I'd absolutely be up for additional seasons. I'm making a point to praise her and the show up front because I'm already seeing a wave of contrarian hipster fucks like
this saying it wasn't actually any good (if you guessed without looking that this was a Gawker link, you are correct).
2. I still think that the most plausible scenario is that Adnan did it. The circumstantial evidence is not completely convincing, but as Sarah's friend pointed out, would require Adnan to have had an almost unimaginable string of bad luck if he were innocent. I more or less gave up on trying to find any "tells" that he might have been lying in his calls with Sarah. There were a few times he got kind of flustered when Sarah asked him a difficult question, but not really conclusive. The biggest takeaway I got was that he is very smart--the smartest, I think, of any of the principals involved in the case, not just book-smart like a lawyer, but that his thinking was at a higher level. He seemed to be one step ahead of Sarah most of the time during their conversations, anticipating her questions and having well-formed responses. This could be a sign of telling the truth, or of a very good liar with a lot of free time to prepare. Still, the circumstances, and the lack of viable alternative explanations, don't look good for him.
3. Regarding Jay, I was really suspicious of him early on, but the episode called "The Deal with Jay," which I guess was supposed to cast doubt on his story, actually ended up making me more inclined to believe him. He seems like just a weird guy, self-aware of his weirdness, and used to people not trusting him, but I find the basics of his story more believable than any of Adnan's defenses. It's highly possible he's hedging on the degree of his involvement, but the idea that he committed the murder himself, with no involvement from Adnan, with no possible motive other than he maybe thought Adnan was after his girlfriend, seems really far-fetched. And I do think it's feasible that if Adnan were the domineering bully as some have suggested, for Jay to feel legitimately scared and pressed into something he did not want a part of.
4. Related to that last point, a problem with a lot of the analysis I'm hearing is that people are projecting the mindset of mature adults onto people who were only 17-18 at the time. At that age, many of my own thought processes would seem thoroughly irrational and impulsive to my adult self, and that's without having been subjected to anything nearly as extreme as this. The question "But why would he/she do this?" keeps popping up, when "Because he/she was a dumb teenager who wasn't thinking" is a wholly valid response.
5. Didn't see if this was already mentioned on this thread, but
holy shit did Adnan's defense attorney sound like a colossal C-word in the tapes from the trials. I don't think it's unreasonable to conclude her personality could have played a part in turning the jury against her client in a case that otherwise had a lot of question marks and could have ended in an acquittal with more sane/stable representation.
6. The friends of Adnan who had taken up his cause annoyed me and reminded me of the knee-jerk defensive mentality you'd hear whenever one of the popular kids at school got accused of doing something bad. Especially the lawyer girl, whose going out of her way to tell you she was a lawyer reminded me of Tracy Morgan's impression of Star Jones on SNL. A disproportionate amount of the arguments for Adnan's innocence seemed to be based on "I knew him and he would never do this!" and I've heard that before.
7. So this is a spin-off of This American Life, right? I'd heard of TAL a lot, but I guess the name made me assume the series was composed of ultra-quaint Garrison Keillor bullshit stories about a family business that made apple butter or something. Might need to give it a listen now.