Routing Out

The last two days I have been disgusted by the bad words on the videos of Alton Sterling being killed by police officers in Baton Rouge. What disgusts me is that I can’t hear the...

Jeffrey Deskovic is a New York State exoneree, who was released in 2006. He has spent the last four years directing a unique foundation to help other wrongfully-convicted prisoners gain release, exoneration, and find their...

In December 2015, a 29-year-old British man of Somalian origin attacked three passengers with a knife at Leytonstone Underground station in east London, severely injuring one of his victims by cutting his throat, as he...

Impressions and reflections on attending part of Adnan Syed’s second Post-Conviction Relief hearing, which took place in Baltimore, Maryland from February 3rd – 9th 2016. Contrasts and parallels with a court appearance of another young...

Following Amanda Knox’s recent acquittal on slander charges brought by 7 Perugia police officers, who she claimed yelled, slapped at and threatened her during interrogations in November 2007 after her house-mate, Meredith Kercher, had been found murdered, we examine how the simple text message that was the focus for these interrogations was distorted in its meaning by police with the help of interpreter, Anna Donnino. By breaking down the text message into its three components and analyzing their linguistic and semantic characteristics, we explore the disingenuousness of Anna Donnino’s mistranslation, a supposed blunder that led directly to Knox being coerced into signing a statement that falsely implicated her boss, Patrick Lumumba, and to another slander charge when it was realized he had been uninvolved. Knox has never been exonerated of this ostensible “fingering” of Patrick Lumumba. Does Anna Donnino bear some responsibility for Patrick Lumumba’s arrest and Amanda Knox’s upheld slander conviction?

We look at the parallels between the Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey cases from Making a Murderer and those of other high-profile defendants such as Adnan Syed, Amanda Knox and the West Memphis Three, and at some of the defendant characteristics and police and prosecution tactics that heighten the likelihood of wrongful conviction, especially when minors and the mentally compromised are involved. We examine why defendants succumb to false confessions, the unreliability of polygraph tests, media misrepresentation, and the tendency towards blind faith in the prosecution’s narrative by victims’ families, even in the face of absurd prosecution forensics, and in some cases, eventual exoneration.

You won’t believe it, but somehow our narrator has managed to get through decades of life without ever having watched a single Star Wars movie from beginning to end…. till now. Hear her irreverent observations...

An elderly couple, Allan and Dolores Avery, stoically marching on…….

Did the response to "Serial"’s first season reinforce the already developing notion that podcasts and podcasting was a “white people” thing? How did this idea get propagated into a social media meme, and what message did it imply? We look at what led up to "Saturday Night Live"’s sardonic take on the end of "Serial"’s first season, and hear the perspectives of a panel of African American podcasters at the first DC PodFest.

November has come and gone. So? Where is it??

Are beard-wearers all muscularly-challenged hipsters in gender-identity crisis? Bearded philosopher and writer Dr. Carsten “Baal” Müller, owner of the beard products website Bartkultur, talks about the history of the beard, and its resurgence in popularity in recent years. He shares his interesting perspectives on the advantages of wearing a beard, and the cultural tendencies he thinks may be reinforcing men’s investment in their beards. This episode of Routing Out is in honour of No-Shave November, which supports cancer research and education. Please make a donation to the Let It Grow campaign at our fund-raising page at  www.no-shave.org/member/routingoutpodcast

Pagan…… a word that, for some, sums up negative assumptions about morbid people practising dark and unwholesome rituals. But is this the true nature of Pagan ritual, and the people who practise paganism? What do pagans celebrate in their ceremonies,  and what attitudes, emotions and preoccupations to they bring to their practise? We join a group of Pagans as they celebrate the Autumn festival of Samhain, to find out for ourselves….. Listen in, and make up your own minds....

Many who regard Halloween as an unwholesome, even evil festival cite its focus on death. We explore the origins of the relationship between Halloween and death, who has been preoccupied with death through the ages, and how. We look at the meaning of death from the perspective of the Romans, ancient Celts, early Christians, Catholics and modern-day pagans, and debunk some of the misconceptions about what has motivated people to mark the various festivals that have contributed to Halloween as we know it today.

The case of Adnan Syed, the subject of the podcast “Serial”, has been followed and analysed predominantly from the perspective of its possibly being a wrongful conviction. That Adnan was a minor charged as an adult in draconian Maryland is an issue that is barely pondered. This is borne out when we interview some Serial fans and find out what made an impact on them about Adnan Syed's case. We give an overview of adolescent psychology, and the inappropriateness of charging teenagers as adults, and we examine the recent history of juvenile justice sentencing reform as a context for the October 13th, 2015 SCOTUS hearing on Montgomery v. Louisiana, the petition to have the 2012 Miller v. Alabama ruling against mandatory Life Without Parole for minors made retroactive.

No matter how mainstream having tattoos has become, there still remain some designs that give cause for pause, not just for viewers, but for tattoo artists themselves. We explore the relationship between artist and client, and how sensitive and provocative designs are negotiated.... or even denied. Are some symbols in and of themselves inherently offensive, or is it the overall visual context or the client’s mindset that endows the nature of a particular tattoo’s meaning? Could these concerns be the reason for reticence among some tattoo artists to allow outsiders to probe their craft? …. oh, and something puzzling is solved.

A twenty-something Midwestern Millennial living in Washington DC has an unexpected and ambiguous encounter with a strangely-tattooed man, triggering a chain of assumptions, judgments, speculations, behavioural reactions…….. and a numerical conundrum. How would you have reacted to this meeting? We asked a random collection of young DC residents, and got some widely varying and interesting answers…. But that numerological enigma remains……

Digging up the curious... quirky... controversial... Unearthing and exploring the unusual, odd, and unique in the ordinary, the uncomfortable lurking in the universally accepted or condoned, and the mundane, quaint and humorous in people and subjects popularly deemed to be provocative, outrageous or sensational…. and any combination of the above…. People and situations, including ourselves and our own lifestyles, are usually much less conveniently categorized than we are led, or lead ourselves to believe. However hard we look for or cling to reassuring archetypes that affirm our preferences and prejudices, we are continually flummoxed and frustrated by individuals or groups who go against the grain of their perceived category, or who reveal character traits that sit uncomfortably with our desire to revere or condemn them outright… that is, as long as we don’t turn our backs on the unfamiliar. Get a taste of Routing Out, reflections, ponderings, ruminations.... and speculations as to the nature of what we might unearth.... No promises....