A Different Kind of "Mystery Dinner"

Enjoy delectable pasta with a side order of "If I Did It..."

Greetings readers! Sorry about the silence, there are a few reasons for it. The main reason is that Söring’s been quiet lately, so there hasn’t been much to respond to. He has released a series of YouTube videos about his case (one of which is called “The Broken and Corrupt U.S. Justice System”), but they merely re-hash familiar arguments and haven’t had much of an impact. Nevertheless, they show that he is still invested in convincing people of his innocence, even at this late date. Söring also created, then deleted, a few TikTok videos in which he complained about anonymous trolls harassing him on the Internet. Some people think that when he impersonated the troll, he was mocking my American-accented German. I found this all pretty amusing. Needless to say, I don’t spend time harassing Söring under various names online; I’m way too busy for that. In any case, he deleted them.

Upcoming Interview

I was contacted by a journalist a week ago who is writing a story about Söring for a regional German newspaper. We had a nice chat for about an hour. The journalist had interviewed Söring in 2017 and did so again recently. Söring regaled her with a list of all the “experts” who have declared his case to be a wrongful conviction, also a subject of one of his recent videos. The experts, though, are all the usual suspects from the pre-2020 days, before the Wright Report came out. I pointed out to the journalist that since the Wright Report, and the major changes to Söring’s Wikipedia entry (which now links to plenty of sources skeptical of his claims), none of his American supporters has said anything about his case except Amanda Knox — and that interview was almost exclusively about his life post-release.

Everyone else — Reid, Harding, Flom, Grisham, and others — has remained deafeningly silent about Söring’s case. If they’ve visited him in Germany, there’s no record of it. As I noted here some time ago, two of his Virginia supporters were eager to have the evidence in Söring’s case re-tested using cutting-edge new techniques DNA not available in 2009. Söring refused the testing plan, which must have left them puzzled, if not suspicious. I urged the German reporter to get in touch with these folks and ask them why they’ve been so quiet.

In fact, I’m not even sure the piece will come out. It’s happened at least 5 times: A journalist plans to do a profile or interview with Söring, and decides to call me up or contact me out of a general sense of duty to hear “the other side”. They usually know nothing about the case at this point except what Söring has told them. After I give them my spiel (which sounds rehearsed by now), the piece never gets published. One of these journos later told me “I was planning to do a pretty standard story about how he got an unfair trial, because that’s what I saw in the first few Google results and what I got from him. But now I see that there’s a lot more to this than I thought, and frankly I don’t have to time to get into all the details before my deadline arrives. So I just gave up.” Add to that the fact that the story is stale: Söring has recited his stories of prison life hundreds of times by now, and there are no new developments in his case and — as long as he refuses DNA testing — there never will be.

One interesting thing is that when journalists have spoken to me and to Söring in the past few months, they now know that Söring sued me for libel and lost, which is something he never discusses on his own. Söring has evidently realized he needs some spin for this unflattering fact, so he complains bitterly that the German justice system has “apparently” concluded that it’s OK for people to go around saying he’s going to kill people. That’s the gist of what he says starting at about 44:00 here (g). The newspaper reporter I spoke to also mentioned the lawsuit. I was happy to clarify that Söring’s lawyers retracted the lawsuit after being grilled by the judges at the Higher Regional Court, and that my original post never said anything like what Söring claimed it did. I also pointed out that the post is still up in its exact original wording, because no judge ever found any part of it to be defamatory.

A Different Kind of Mystery Dinner

Söring hasn’t had any other live appearances lately, but just announced that he will be in residence, so to speak at the fancy Cologne restaurant "Consilium” on the 3rd, 4th, and 5th of March 2023. For €49.50, you get a glass of champers, an appetizer, and a pasta course. Söring will regale you with his tales from the Big House, and afterwards will take all questions, “with no limits”, as he stresses. He advertises it as a “different kind of mystery-dinner (Krimi-dinner).” Mystery dinners — where you solve a fictitious crime while enjoying a gourmet meal — are popular in Germany. Once again I’m reminded of the book O.J. Simpson published after his acquittal, “If I Did It”, in which he tantalizes the reader with a “what-if” scenario of how the murders went down. The delicious irony of this is is that the relatives of Simpson’s victims successfully sued Simpson in civil court, and to ensure Simpson paid at least some of the damages, a judge assigned the rights to this book to the victims’ relatives. They then promptly released a version of the book called “If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer” in which “If” almost invisible.

Working on an Analysis of “Serial” and Adnan Syed

The principal reason I’ve been quiet lately is that I’m working on another analysis of a supposed wrongful conviction, this time the case of Adnan Syed, the subject of Season One of “Serial”, one of the most-downloaded podcasts in history. After deluge of media attention to his case, Syed was recently released from prison after serving 23 years. To say that “Serial” has generated online discussion is like saying that Kayla Lemieux is somewhat well-endowed. The subreddit has 77,000 members who are still going at it hammer and tongs.

One thing that getting into the Adnan Syed case makes clear is just how flimsy Söring’s claims are. Adnan Syed never confessed to the crime, he has a sort-of alibi witness, and there is some evidence of corner-cutting by the police and prosecutors in his case, although whether it rises to the level of misconduct is hotly disputed. In other words, his claim to be the victim of a miscarriage of justice is much stronger than Söring’s. I’m not saying it’s valid, but it is much more convincing. In fact, it just led to Syed’s exoneration.

One thing I’ve noted in looking at these cases and others is how online discussion forums change over time. Before, say, 2019, the discussion board at Allmystery, a sort of German version of Reddit, was almost entirely pro-Söring. Users leapt on every inconsistency and loose end, confident that with just a few more hours of online sleuthing, they would find the “smoking gun” exonerating Jens Söring. But the smoking gun never went off. In fact, as more and more information became available, the tone switched. People realized the quest to prove Söring innocent had been futile from the beginning. Moderators in fact decided to simply shut down any discussion of Söring’s innocence claims, since there was no longer any real disagreement on them among people who closely followed the case. The forum is now called simply “The Person Jens Söring”. Something similar happened with the Adnan Syed case: The subreddit went from highly favorable to his innocence claims to about 60/30 pro-guilt now (10% undecided). One reason was that all the media attention to the case forced the release of thousands of internal police and defense-lawyer documents which ended up containing some favorable but much incriminating material never before seen. In both the Söring and Syed cases, the more information came out, the fewer doubts there were among the informed about whether the conviction was justified. An interesting phenomenon suitable for a sociology dissertation!

In any case, I will let everyone know when the article on Adnan Syed comes out, and will try to find some time to post or YouTube about Söring once in a while. Thanks for your patience!