I am not a lawyer but all of her court room scenes gave the impression that she was bad at her job. ..... Don’t trust that the attorney from the big law firm is actually smart.

So I only did criminal defense work for a few years. With some obvious exceptions inherent in any creative dramatization of real life stuff, I thought this was a fairly accurate portrayal of how folks wrongly (or rightly!) accused behave (which is to say, a whole bunch of different goofy ways).

I think the only unbelievably stupid character here was Kapoor. Box and the prosecutor not pursuing other leads at first because they convinced themselves they had their man? Believable. Naz’s mistakes can clearly be chalked up to him being a kid thrown into Rikers, and the ones at the crime scene to immense stress.…

Yeah, honestly, amazingly competent people in the justice system are few and far between. Most of them are dumb. This was one of the few shows that showed just how dumb people are to get into these kinds of situations.

why do you think Box was an accomplished and thorough detective? Sure he made it all the way to retirement but I’m sure a lot of bad detectives do to.

I’m not sure I agree with the idea that Chandra has previously been portrayed as competent. She had been portrayed and young and in over her head. Her first big character beat was advising Naz not to take the plea offer, even though they had him dead to rights at that point and the two more experienced defense…

Because he was on the verge of retirement, and was gift-wrapped the perfect suspect in his last murder case?

It’s like, have none of you watched Making a Murderer?

He got the Sinbad tattoo because Freddy gave him the option of being known as Sinbad or Aladdin . I am sure if you dive into Sinbad we would find some parallels between his and Naz’s story. He started smuggling drugs because he need protection after another inmate tried to burn his face off. Thats not really that hard…

No shit, that criticism is ridiculous.

I can see you watched Dexter too!

Utterly agree. There were flawed elements in the writing, characters etc, but without wishing to get too “Breaking the movie magic 101” (which would be a great miniseries for couch based pizza delivery experts), the characters all made poor decisions, like most of us do. We’re commenting on a hackjob on Deadspin...…

To your last point, I’d counter that the reason “Omar” (Michael K. Williams is basically the same fantastic character in every show) was so into Naz was that he was a profoundly lonely man. Naz was someone he could identify with and confide in, someone who he believed matched his intellect. The problem was that this…

While I agree the Kapoor stuff seemed contrived I disagree with what you said about Box.

The most glaring error in this show as far as I’m concerned is that Andrea was found in a blood-soaked heap on her bed, with splatters going up the wall... and yet Naz woke up downstairs with only a very small amount of blood on him (from Andrea’s hand wound).

Yep. And since the guy who’s mother was the drug mule had killed himself in the jail. He couldn’t have taken the stand without drugs. Also, the security camera footage is controlled by corrupt jailers. Kapoor was 100% certain she could win the case by having him testify and young people do stupid things. She took a…

Agreed! I’ve read a bunch of criticism on this point, but knowing what we know about the justice system is it really beyond the realm of possibilities that cops with more than enough evidence to convict a Muslim kid of viciously murdering a young white girl wouldn’t just...go with that? And not try to dig any deeper?

In my opinion the part about Box not checking the security camera from before Andrea got in the cab, underscores the point made in Stone’s closing and which happens in real life: that police and prosecutors (even the most detail orientated) fixate on a certain suspect and ignore evidence to the contrary (conviction…

Box counterpoint: Cops and prosecutors not pursuing any other directions because they convince themselves the first answer is the right one is completely realistic.

Although I agree with you on the ham-fistedness of these few things, I really enjoyed the show and am glad I watched it. I found it pretty entertaining and thought it did a good job of keeping you guessing about who did it - which for me was enough to maintain the show’s watchabiity.