{"id":35875,"date":"2022-09-20T14:38:09","date_gmt":"2022-09-20T14:38:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/?p=35875"},"modified":"2022-09-20T14:38:09","modified_gmt":"2022-09-20T14:38:09","slug":"adnan-syed-serial-and-justice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/index.php\/2022\/09\/20\/adnan-syed-serial-and-justice\/","title":{"rendered":"Adnan Syed, Serial, and justice"},"content":{"rendered":"

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In 2000,<\/strong> a court in Maryland sentenced a teenager named Adnan Syed to life in prison. He had been convicted of the murder, a year earlier, of Hae Min Lee, his former high school girlfriend, who was strangled to death and buried in a Baltimore park. Syed said that he had nothing to do with the murder, but prosecutors claimed he had grown jealous after Lee started dating someone else, and an acquaintance of Syed\u2019s testified that he helped bury the body\u2014a claim, prosecutors said, that was supported by cellphone location data. As the years passed, Syed maintained his innocence<\/a>; in the mid-2010s, he was granted a new hearing, then a new trial, before, in 2018, an appeals court vacated his conviction. Syed remained behind bars, though\u2014and, a year later, Maryland\u2019s highest court ruled that he wouldn\u2019t get a new trial after all. The US Supreme Court then declined to take up Syed\u2019s case, without citing a reason<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This was not the end of the matter, though. Last year, Syed\u2019s lawyers asked prosecutors to modify his sentence, citing a recent Maryland law making certain long-term felons convicted as juveniles eligible for reconsideration. That request wasn\u2019t supposed to trigger a reevaluation of the evidence in Syed\u2019s case, but that\u2019s what ended up happening inside the prosecutors\u2019 office; meanwhile, Syed\u2019s lawyers asked for new DNA testing to be performed, citing developments in technology since his conviction, and prosecutors agreed<\/a>. While the DNA analysis has not yet thrown up any conclusive findings, the prosecutors\u2019 broader review did<\/em> unearth new evidence in the case, not least details concerning two alternative suspects, that was not made available to Syed\u2019s lawyers at the time, in apparent violation<\/a> of the law. The review also cast fresh doubt on the testimony of Syed\u2019s acquaintance and the reliability of the cellphone data. Last week, prosecutors asked a judge to vacate Syed\u2019s conviction for a second time, acknowledging that they \u201cno longer had confidence\u201d in its \u201cintegrity.\u201d Yesterday, the judge concurred<\/a>\u2014and this time, Syed was allowed to walk out of prison. There were gasps inside the courtroom<\/a>. Outside<\/a>, there were cheers.<\/p>\n

ICYMI: The rise and rise of partisan local newsrooms<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Syed\u2019s case, for all its twists and turns, would not have been a big national news story yesterday if it hadn\u2019t intersected, a few years ago, with a moment of media history: the birth of the investigative podcast Serial<\/em> and, with it, the enduring craze of real-life-mystery narrative audio (even if, as CJR\u2019s Brendan Fitzgerald wrote at the time<\/a>, Serial<\/em> didn\u2019t bill itself in such terms). Serial<\/em> launched in 2014 as a spin-off of the high-end public-radio mainstay This American Life<\/em>, as that show explored the possibilities of telling a single compelling story episodically (hence: Serial<\/em>), rather than many compelling stories over the course of a series. \u201cOur hope is to give you the same experience you get from a great HBO or Netflix series, where you get caught up with the characters and the thing unfolds week after week, and you just have to hear what happens next, but with a story that\u2019s true,\u201d This American Life<\/em>\u2019s Ira Glass wrote at the time<\/a>. \u201cLike House of Cards<\/em> or Game of Thrones,<\/em> but you can enjoy it while you\u2019re driving.\u201d Sarah Koenig, a onetime criminal-justice reporter at the Baltimore Sun<\/em>, had already been investigating Syed\u2019s case for This American Life<\/em>, where she now worked, when she decided to build the story out into its own series. The form\u2014podcast documentary\u2014was relatively novel, but the basic concept wasn\u2019t. \u201cTrying to do it as a serial\u2014this is as old as Dickens,\u201d Koenig said<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Koenig had been turned on to Syed\u2019s story by Rabia Chaudry, a lawyer and old friend of Syed\u2019s who has been vocal in asserting his innocence. Rather than wrapping up her investigation, then packaging it, Koenig continued to report as Serial<\/em> started to roll out<\/a>, meaning that, even as her findings became public, she didn\u2019t know precisely where they would lead. In the end, the show did not take a conclusive position on Syed\u2019s guilt or produce a smoking gun. But it did raise serious questions about due process<\/a>. Some of these concerned the reliability of the cellphone data and the fact that key evidence was never tested for Syed\u2019s DNA. Koenig also tracked down and interviewed a possible alibi who claimed to have been with Syed at the time of Lee\u2019s killing.<\/p>\n

By the time the series wrapped up, it was not only a huge hit\u2014it was a cultural phenomenon. Millions of people downloaded it, and many got hooked, including other journalists, who publicly dissected every narrative turn. Slate<\/em> made a podcast about the podcast; BuzzFeed<\/em> called it \u201cThe Year\u2019s Best New Crime Drama (And It\u2019s Not on TV).\u201d<\/a> It was praised for shining a light on the broader inequities of the criminal-justice system<\/a> and for its radical novelty of journalistic form; writing in CJR, Joyce Barnathan hailed it as groundbreaking in its real-time transparency of craft<\/a>. The Innocence Project at the University of Virginia launched its own probe of Syed\u2019s case<\/a>. (Syed is now represented by a lawyer from an Innocence Project clinic at the University of Baltimore<\/a>.) So did legions of amateur sleuths, who traded findings, tips, and speculation in online forums, not least Reddit. Subcommunities spawned subcommunities. (\u201cThere has always been a conflict on this subreddit between those of us who wanted to pursue the case quasi-independently and those who didn\u2019t want to \u2018spoil\u2019 Koenig\u2019s narrative,\u201d one user, Thousandshipz, told The Guardian<\/em> at the time<\/a>.) Syed\u2019s family listened, too. \u201cSome days I\u2019ll be like, \u2018This is a really great episode,\u2019\u201d Yusef, Adnan\u2019s brother, said<\/a>, \u201cand some days I\u2019ll feel down and depressed.\u201d<\/p>\n

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As is usually the case with cultural touchstones that generate outsize attention, not everyone liked the series. Some listeners felt that its denouement fizzled into dissatisfying irresolution<\/a>; others felt that the show painted an overly generous portrait of Syed and even that it cherry-picked details<\/a>. (Koenig has always<\/a> stressed<\/a> that she is a reporter who seeks facts, not easy answers or a cinematic ending.) It was criticized for not shining enough of a light on the broader inequities of the criminal-justice system<\/a> and for its radical break with journalistic form<\/a>. Writing for the (now sadly defunct) Awl<\/em>, Jay Caspian Kang took issue with Koenig\u2019s rendering of the distinct immigrant communities from which Syed (who is Pakistani American) and Lee (who was Korean American) hailed<\/a>, adding, \u201cI can think of no better definition of white privilege in journalism than that.\u201d And the show\u2019s obsessive fanbase was criticized, too, or at least urged to remember the very human consequences of Lee\u2019s murder. \u201cTO ME ITS REAL LIFE,\u201d a user claiming to be Hae\u2019s brother wrote in a Reddit post at the time<\/a>. \u201cTo you listeners, its another murder mystery, crime drama, another episode of CSI.\u201d<\/p>\n

The mass appeal of Serial<\/em> endured regardless, outlasting the Syed story. The show produced a second season<\/a>, on the strange story of the abducted US soldier Bowe Bergdahl, then a third<\/a>, charting a \u201cyear inside a typical American courthouse,\u201d in Cleveland. In 2017, Serial<\/em>, itself initially a spin-off, launched a spin-off of its own, S-Town<\/em><\/a>. In 2020, Serial Productions, the company behind both shows, was acquired by the New York Times<\/em> in a deal aimed at bolstering the Times<\/em>\u2019 growing audio footprint and helping Serial Productions to produce more. The partnership has since spawned shows about white parents and public schools<\/a>, a real-life election-fraud case in North Carolina<\/a>, and institutionalized Islamophobia in the UK<\/a>. Then there were all the serialized true-crime series, in audio and other media, that had nothing to do with Serial<\/em> but borrowed from its approach to varying extents. In 2019, Glass\u2019s hopes for Serial<\/em> came full-circle, in a sense, as HBO picked up Syed\u2019s story in a documentary that, while also ending without a smoking gun, broke the news that Syed\u2019s DNA was not found on Lee\u2019s body or car<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Prosecutors, of course, would later grant Syed\u2019s lawyers official new DNA testing, though by that point, the reevaluation of his case triggered by his sentencing request was underway and officials cited the latter as the impetus for agreeing to the DNA step. Indeed, from the outside at least, it\u2019s hard to satisfyingly pinpoint the impact that Serial<\/em> and, later, HBO\u2019s show had on the events that led to Syed walking out of prison yesterday: they raised and then kept huge public attention on his case in a way that can\u2019t easily be separated from the progress of the case itself, and yet the vacating of his sentence took years, and ultimately flowed from a new law and an official procedure. In a follow-up episode of Serial<\/em> released this morning<\/a>, Koenig, who was at the courthouse yesterday<\/a>, described the motion to vacate as having \u201cburst like a firework\u201d out of the prosecutors\u2019 office and said that she had herself been working to understand what had happened, eventually reporting that a new prosecutor, who formerly worked as a public defender, read Syed\u2019s file after fielding his sentence-review request and grew concerned. Ultimately, \u201call the actual evidence\u201d underpinning prosecutors\u2019 motion to vacate \u201cwas known or knowable to cops and prosecutors back in 1999,\u201d Koenig concluded. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to feel cheered about a triumph of fairness, because we\u2019ve built a system that takes more than twenty years to self-correct.\u201d<\/p>\n

Syed\u2019s story is still not resolved, even now. He has not been exonerated and will be detained at home for at least the next thirty days, during which time prosecutors will have to decide whether to drop the charges or start a new trial. Koenig describes the odds that Syed will be prosecuted again as \u201cremote at best.\u201d Even then, though, the key question in the case\u2014Who killed Hae Min Lee?<\/em>\u2014will remain unanswered, at least in the short term. Yesterday, Lee\u2019s brother Young Lee addressed the court via Zoom. He said that he does not oppose a new investigation in the case if justice demands it. But he also expressed anguish at all the twists and turns along the way. \u201cWhenever I think it\u2019s over, and it\u2019s ended, it always comes back,\u201d Young Lee said. \u201cThis is not a podcast for me. This is real life\u2014a never-ending nightmare for twenty-plus years.\u201d<\/p>\n

Below, more on Syed, Serial<\/em>, and true crime:<\/p>\n