If you haven't listened to the original season...despite the insufferably overwhelming hype it has received (including for its purported role in single-handedly revitalizing the podcast industry), Serial is still very much worth a listen. It seems a lot of people were annoyed by how it didn't advocate a strong conclusion (e.g. Adnan is innocent/guilty)...to me, that was never the point...I loved it not just a time capsule of the late 90s and coming-of-age stories in general, but also a compelling portrait of how fragile our individual and collective memories are. Even without this recent, dramatic development, it's one of the best pieces of journalism I've experienced in recent years.
edit: grammar, and obligatory link to the website for the first season, which itself is a great example of online journalism in how pieces of evidence discussed on the show were also uploaded with further explanatory writing: https://serialpodcast.org/season-one/1/the-alibi
One of my favorite bits was the lengths the producers went to confirm whether or not Best Buy had a payphone 15 years ago. The show, IMO, also served as a great example of how to do investigative research and is a must-listen for aspiring journalists for that reason alone.
I'll provide a counterpoint: I really love listening to podcasts (quick plug for the "Keepin' It 1600" podcast as my favorite recently) and often in the crime and justice genre. I mostly got to listening to Serial because I've been listening to This American Life for a decade; I consider TAL to have about 70% good content with occasional really good ones (ex: the one explaining the financial crisis) and occasionally truly terrible ones (ex: the one with the guy trying to find the origin of a particular hold music tune). Just stating this so you know where I'm coming from, a background of my tastes.
I found Serial to be grating and and not very good at keeping my attention. I really didn't understand the hype at all and I really had to force myself to sit through the last couple episodes just so I could say I finished (I got a similar feeling when approaching the last episode of the second season of True Detective). I didn't find the story compelling at all.
Personally I enjoyed the hold music tone episode. I think I like the investigative quality and the back and forth questioning that slowly reveals the layers of a situation.
The ones I have a hard time listening to are the ones where they have an actor read an excerpt a book. Sometimes it's interesting, and sometimes, it's just a guy reading a book.
I agree, but I give them credit for attempting to do what they ultimately did not pull off: to find a smoking gun that changes a murder case, in near-real-time, for an audience of millions.
As a listener, this meant I honestly felt like I had wasted a huge amount of time on the show.
But I was rooting for them right up to the point at which I began cursing them.
The fact that he now has a new trial should be enough to make up for that. The "smoking gun" was that there was no real case against him, but he was convicted and in jail.
The show was packaged up and delivered as titillating entertainment. A first-person radio whodunnit for the post-radio age.
So, many weeks later, when the final word was "gosh maybe we'll never know!", I felt like I'd clicked on a series of those "What happened next will shock you!" headlines.
A compelling story reaching the same conclusion probably could have been handled in a single episode.
> So, many weeks later, when the final word was "gosh maybe we'll never know!"
But... that's the point. The finally episode spells this out very explicitly - although they can't say either way whether he did it or not, they found they don't have sufficient proof they he did commit the crime he was convicted for, and therefore does not deserve to be in jail.
It must get better, but I couldn't get through the first episode, which is odd, since I generally enjoy documentaries and dramatizations of true crime or investigative journalism.
Sunk cost fallacy. I find myself doing that with TV series too. I'll binge watch a few seasons and then it gets bad. I also know that sometimes better writers come on during different seasons so I'll slog through the bad ones in the hope that a good season will appear. I could just look up episode ratings on IMDB and skip around, but then there is the problem of missing pieces of large story arcs.
Well, in addition to what others had said, I was hoping there would be a conclusion in this case. I felt a bit invested in the story and didn't know there would essentially be no conclusion at the end. If I had known, I probably would not have finished it.
I think the only real genius of Serial was using a slick style and conversational tone as a gloss for what was quite poor (and arguably irresponsible) reporting. As an example, the whole Best Buy charade was only reenacted either out of their unfamiliarity with the facts of the case (the court transcripts reveal the exact location of the phone), or with more cynical intentions, depending on how generous you want to be.
I find his response to this question compelling when talking about Sarah Koenig and Serial:
" Was the name ‘Serial’ ever used?
No. Not to my recollection. She kept saying ‘This American Life,’ ‘the radio,’ and ‘a documentary.’ There was no talk of ‘Serial’ or a podcast. Then I asked her outright, ‘Are you an advocate for Adnan?’ She said ‘No,’ that she wasn’t his advocate. But she said that she had talked to Adnan, and she wanted to get more information about the case. She said there was new evidence, and I said there’s no new evidence that’s gonna change what I saw: I saw Hae dead in the trunk of the car. If Adnan wants to take the stand now and explain that away, let him. But there’s no evidence that’s gonna change what I saw. I don’t know how she was murdered, I don’t know exactly how she got put in that trunk, and I told the cops that. If Koenig wants to get into how that all happened she can go there. But that doesn’t change what I saw. And that’s the only time I commented directly on the case to her. "
I totally agree, but I find it funny that you started by decrying the hype the series has received, and then almost immediately after claimed it to be one of the best pieces of journalism you've heard recently. :)
Ah I think it deserves the hype. But I got on the bandwagon just as it started...from my experience, the people who didn't catch it early on eagerly participated in the backlash...but that's just in media circles, where there's pressure to be either the first adopter or "too cool for school". To be fair, the number of podcasts that arose exclusively to cover meta-Serial was pretty obscene...imagine "The Walking Dead", except with "Talking Dead"-type shows on five different networks.
They opened with the whole memory thing and I found it sort of leading. Not to post spoilers but obviously I don't know exactly what I did 6 weeks ago. I can guess. Maybe even think of a few specific things. However, 6 weeks ago my first love and someone I was very close to didn't disappear one day. Further, I haven't spent the next 6 weeks as a teenager in a high school, which, if things haven't changed since my time, are dramatic rumor mills.
I just know that if someone that close to me disappeared, I'd be reliving and remembering that day and the days after to the point it'd be burned in my mind.
You say you would remember better if you were in that situation, but how do you know? Some evidence[0] suggests that memories are more distorted the more they are remembered, so "reliving and remembering that day" may actually make things worse. Note that this may not affect your confidence in the memories. Since we're talking about podcasts, I should mention that there's a Radiolab episode[1] that discusses this.
It's really weird that a comment pointing out scientific evidence is downvoted here.
Memory is bad, period. And we don't even realize it. It's extremely common to be absolutely certain you've observed something, which never ever happened.
The point of the podcast wasn't to convince you that he's innocent, though. The main reason they led with that was to prepare you for a series where 90% of the interviewees don't really remember most of what happened. It's not just about Adnan, it's about everyone involved, and how they can all have such conflicting accounts. It wasn't everyone vs. Adnan, it was everyone vs. everyone else.
Yeah, but he didn't find out (assuming you believe he's innocent, like I do) until days later. What's seared into your mind is that point forward, not the past. Forget six weeks ago, I have trouble remembering what happened a few days ago often, without scrolling through emails or other things of that nature to jog my memory. He has since relived it in his mind over and over, but the detail is already gone.
Not to get in to the details, but her family called him looking for her that night. And like I said, if I get a weird phone call from a friends family looking for them and the next day they don't show up to school, you better believe it is ALL me and my friends are going to be talking about. It's just not something people, let alone high school kids, ignore.
I don't understand the 'firmly' bit. The state's case was flimsy and the state's timeline was a total mess. The cell tower evidence was flaky and one of the state's expert witnesses rescinded his testimony. Jay is a terrible witness who changed his story multiple times. The state needs Jay AND the cell tower evidence to stick and I don't think it does.
In my opinion, the state's case was flimsy because they didn't really know what happened or how. Jay was involved drastically more than he let on, which explains his consistently changing story and the fact that his story doesn't match the cell phone records. Adnan knows Jay is lying, but obviously can't expose him without confessing his own role.
As I said, I firmly believe he's innocent, but based on your comment, I checked the timeline, and it is interesting to me that an officer apparently called Adnan the same night she disappeared. I have to admit, that would probably crystallize the relevant afternoon a bit in my memory.
That said, as other sibling comments are saying, one's memory is surprisingly poor. This is sort of tangential, but for example, I've sat in a classroom, where as an experiment on eyewitness testimony, someone comes in (without the class knowing what's happening) and in a very exaggerated manner steals something from the professor and then leaves. Literally a minute later, when asked, much of the class misidentifies major physical attributed of the 'perpetrator' (height, hair color, etc.), even when they are confident they are correct.
>I have to admit, that would probably crystallize the relevant afternoon a bit in my memory.
He was high. I think that part was corroborated by multiple people. Everybody reacts differently. How Adnan reacted when he heard she disappeared shouldn't be the backbone of deciding whether or not he is innocent or guilty.
All the other kids didn't think murder when she disappeared either. There was a rumour going around that she ran away to Cali to see her father. It took a few days before the realization sunk in.
Isn't it pretty well accepted that, psychologically, your memories are severely distorted and sometimes entirely lost in times of extreme emotional distress?
He may be convicted again. I didn't think they established motive all that strongly, and something was odd about the guy who claimed to have helped bury the body.
That's a good point, but I think things were more nuanced than that (at least IIRC ;)...I haven't re-listened to it since the original broadcast)...the victim's disappearance was not thought of as a disappearance until at least a week or so later -- her body wasn't found until a month later. Even though her family reported her as missing the day of her actual disappearance...I believe Adnan claimed that he thought she had just gone on some crazy trip, as teenagers are wont to do. Sure, the victim's family would argue that she was the kind of good girl who would never do such a thing, but she was also someone who carried out a sexual relation with Adnan without her family's knowledge or acceptance...so, your typical -- but complicated -- teenage drama, except that it ended in a tragic and mysterious murder case. But if Adnan is innocent, his excuse makes sense to me -- he knew what a rebellious girl Hae Min Lee was, and there was no reason to keep frozen in mind the day of her initial disappearance.
That said, it did bother me how he apparently never thought to call on her during the time of her disappearance, even though they were no longer a couple. That was probably one of the strongest pieces of circumstantial evidence against him, in my eyes.
One of the most compelling aspects of the case for me is that while I can see why Adnan garnered the sympathy of advocates and the interest of Serial's producers, at least enough to warrant a full season of coverage...I still couldn't quite shake the feeling that even if he isn't guilty beyond a reasonable doubt...that he might still be guilty of the actual murder. I can't remember the last time a story so full of ambiguity so completely captured my attention.
"That said, it did bother me how he apparently never thought to call on her during the time of her disappearance, even though they were no longer a couple. That was probably one of the strongest pieces of circumstantial evidence against him, in my eyes."
I don't know about you, but like most people, I'm not on speaking terms with most of my ex-es.
That was a point of contention on the show, IIRC. The prosecution argued that Adnan was jealous. Adnan claimed to be on OK terms with Lee, even giving her his new phone number shortly before her disappearance. IIRC, this was an angle of suspicion for the Serial producers, who found it strange that he didn't bother to call her after her disappearance.
(I'm on speaking terms with my exes. Even am still Facebook friends)
My theory is that rather than popularizing the podcast industry, the first season of Serial ruined it, because both the underlying story and the multi-episode presentation are so compelling that basically nothing else can live up to it. It's a Romeo and Juliet tale about a secret relationship between a Muslim boy and a Korean girl, and we both hear excerpts from her diary and also listen to the guy from prison 15 years later (so you can judge whether you think he's lying). It's just some of the best 10 hours of content you'll ever hear.
While compelling, the most frustrating thing about "Serial" was the narrative manipulation. Audience manipulation is the hallmark of any documentary, but in the type of chronological style that "Serial" and Netflix's "Making a Murderer" chose, it is much more deceptive. "Serial" didn't pay off--the central enlightenment is tepid observations that "memory is faulty" and/or "it's hard for journalists to ferret out truth". "Making a Murderer" at least sounded a ringing indictment against the criminal justice system as a whole, and corruption of petty incompetents holding power. "Serial" seemed like disjointed TAL thinkpieces strung together.
I wanted to write a comment to this effect but you put it into words better than I could hope to.
There was something special about Serial. With regards to the topic itself, how lucky she was to find a story with so many angles and so many holes and so many things to investigate. With regards to the medium, it was something entirely new to me to have something dictated to me through audio in a format that somewhat resembles a documentary, and to have everything visualized only in my imagination. I can visualize Best Buy, and the school, and Leakin park. And for whatever reason, that visualization is especially vivid in my mind, even in comparison to books that I've read a dozen times. I think a big part of it has to do with a feeling of everything occurring in real-time and the stream-of-consciousness that Koenig speaks with. It's a strange feeling to be visualizing the entire context of these events while not being in control of the speed, like you would when reading.
Coupled with the fact that you're making judgements about his innocence and thinking about what-ifs at the same time, and it really pulls you in.
and after listening to 'serial', give 'undisclosed' a listen - they dive much much deeper into the details of the court case, police records, evidence, etc.
It's a very different experience, and clearly incredibly biased, but I agree that it's a good listen if you got into the case and are curious to learn more about the facts and players. Some of the wild theories they come up with though are simply incredible to me - they seem like level headed people much of the time, but the lengths they will go to suggest a conspiracy (where simple incompetence is a much more probable reality) can truly blow my mind.
I just finished season 2 and was surprised by the similar lack of strong conclusion, though still an incredibly interesting and deep look at the Bergdahl case. Now, time to go back and listen to season 1.
>(including for its purported role in single-handedly revitalizing the podcast industry)
Did they really though? I'm a podcast whore, but I also happen to be in the demographic of someone who'd probably listen to podcasts already-and yet I know plenty of people outside of that demographic who consume podcasts just as much. Heck, the last person I'd ever expect to be a podcast consumer-someone who struggles to even click through a hand-held software update started her own fashion podcast years before Serial was even announced.
I believe they were implying with the use of the word purportedly that it actually did not. As you mention, podcasting was already fairly large and growing quickly when Serial hit the spotlight. I get the impression that a lot of established podcasters/listeners got pretty frustrated with the notion that Serial was kickstarting this "cool, new podcasting craze".
Oh yea they did. I don't listen to podcasts, never saw the appeal, yet somehow today I find myself producing one and seeing new ones pop up all the time now.
I listened to Serial and enjoyed it, but have not been following the case fanatically. I think that the massive hype has caused a central point to be missed: The government alleged that Syed killed Lee, and provided a sequence of events. Serial raises many questions about whether that one sequence of events is accurate. It is entirely possibly that Syed killed her but not at the time and place hypothesized by the government. I think this gets missed in all the hoopla. "Retrial" suggests to me that it is the exact same scenario that will be tried once again.
The retrial had very little to do with Serial, and everything to do with the fact that the prosecution withheld a cover page from one of their star witnesses which would have caused him not to give the testimony he gave had he seen it. That's it. A key piece of "evidence" was the Leakin Park call, and the cover sheet that was withheld states that the location data from the Leakin Park call (an incoming call) is not reliable information.
My problem with Serial is that people listened to it and concluded some travesty of justice occurred. But the other side doesn't get to tell their side. Whenever you hear just one side of the story, you can be sure that the truth is significantly different.
Yes, but the problem is whether or not the prosecution's case would have been convincing enough if they had turned over all evidence like they were supposed to.
Our justice system is supposed to require a high enough burden of proof that we don't convict innocent people, even if that means some guilty people aren't convicted as a result. Unfortunately, there have been, and still are, corrupt prosecutors out there that are more concerned with always getting a conviction whether or not there's enough evidence to prove the defendant is guilty.
Even the podcast states at the end that his innocence is far from proven, but that it's not clear that he is guilty. This is another perfect case of reasonable doubt, there is not enough evidence to convict.
This would make for a great case to see what the public opinion would be if he were to be released from prison, only later to have found out that he really did it. Reasonable doubt is tricky, it will let criminals off the hook because the police can not make a proper case.
> "Retrial" suggests to me that it is the exact same scenario that will be tried once again.
I think that is very unlikely. I am not a lawyer, but I have never heard anything that indicates prosecutors have to present the same case upon a retrial. I imagine they will present a case with full knowledge of everything from Serial.
While I loved Serial, and think that it is great that he's getting a retrial, this whole case (and especially the retrial) concerns me. Adnan's family apparently had some money that they could devote to getting more attention for him (and that's fantastic), which helped a lot in getting attention for his case.
But this raises the fact that someone without any means to speak of is basically screwed. Hearing interviews with people who work with the Innocence Project, sometimes the case against convicted felons is shockingly flimsy. Yet, it takes years and a lot of money to get them overturned.
>But this raises the fact that someone without any means to speak of is basically screwed.
Absolutely. My takeaway from listening to Undisclosed (a follow-up to Serial podcast by Adnan's supporters) is how much of a difference having a team of lawyers and investigators makes to casting doubt on presented evidence. That's why money makes such a huge difference. It's not corruption. It's manpower. There is no way a public defender could devote so much time and research like the Undisclosed team did to, say, present a case against the state's cell tower evidence - and that was only one piece of evidence presented to the judge.
Sure, if you have money, it helps in that you are likely to be aware of the Marshall Project, able to contact them, etc. But other than that, it is accessible to everyone.
As someone who attentively listened to the podcasts but became increasingly frustrated by their sensationalism, I was most interested in the story of the one person never interviewed, the victim. Is it really such a shock to most of you that eyewitness accounts from years ago are terrible evidence on which to convict someone? That the criminal justice system as visited on poor people is filled with apathy and incompetence?
The state did a terrible job and there should be a retrial. But shouldn't that poor girl deserve more? Someone killed her. Maybe all the pontificators should devote themselves to her story with the ardor of their attention to Serial.
If you listen to the Truth and Justice podcast, there are people doing exactly as you suggest. Often with semi-reckless abandon and very little to support their case, but they're trying to use what evidence they have to figure out what happened and who killed Hae.
Honestly, listening to it only resolves to me that it's better if most people didn't try to turn their attention to what really happened, because they're never going to be able to put together enough of the story at this late date to do more than ruinously speculate. Truth and Justice puts into better perspective how well Serial did finding what story there was to tell, and telling it fairly.
I enjoyed Serial but, later read critiques of how the Serial podcast was making entertainment out of someone's actual life and another person's actual murder.
As much as I enjoy fictional murder in various mediums, it started to turn my stomach a bit. These are real lives. People actually died.
It's hard for me to find any kind of entertainment out of the idea that what seemed like a kind, gentle young person was actually murdered. Whether Adnan was actually guilty or not, is a matter of the court and maybe the victim's family. It shouldn't be my entertainment.
I think turning the listener's stomach was very much the point. Not only did someone actually get murdered, but the criminal trial that followed it was horribly mis-managed on multiple fronts. The horror of an insane murderer is one thing, but the travesty of our slow and deliberate justice system malfunctioning to such an extreme extent is significantly worse.
I'm glad Syed is getting another trial and certainly the prosecution did not put on a flawless case, but I think it's a bit of a retcon to suggest that this is an instance of a prosecution malfunctioning to an extreme extent (whether it's an instance of the defense doing that: different question).
The prosecution had:
* The confession of an accomplice which included non-public details about the crime
* Cell phone evidence both directly implicating Syed and damaging his alibi
* A series of incriminating misstatements from Syed himself
Remember, the prevailing online sentiment about Hans Reiser was that he'd been stereotyped and then railroaded into a conviction as well. Reiser's defense also hinged on the notion that no physical evidence directly connected him to the crime. But that's not how murder prosecutions work.
My issue with the trial was there was no proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
It is like that documentary that caused waves recently, about the guy whose original rape conviction was overturned by DNA evidence only to get convicted of murder. It's not that there's no evidence Adnan had something to do with the killing. It's that the burden of evidence wasn't met.
The issue though is that his attorney didn't do her job, to the degree that her didn't-do-her-job-tiveness was actually whatever the equivalent to malpractice is in law. So my point is that with hindsight and far more information, in the light of a far more thorough investigation than either side of the trial did in the first place, there's not enough evidence to rise above reasonable doubt. In my opinion, as an idiot layman spouting off on the internet about shit I know nothing about, obviously.
I agree strongly about his attorney. But he didn't end up with a crappy attorney for want of resources: she was an elite defense attorney, suffering (we now know) from serious health defects.
Again: my point isn't that the verdict is correct. It's just that this isn't a great case for prosecution run amok.
the prevailing online sentiment about Hans Reiser was that he'd been stereotyped and then railroaded into a conviction
Setting aside the issue of how prevailing that sentiment was, it seems like a questionable comparison - Reiser could have walked away with murder if not for his own hubris and obstinacy. And surely nobody thought he'd been 'railroaded' after he was convicted and led authorities to his victim's body.
I guess I (maybe mis-?) remember it more from mailing lists but I'll take your word for it on the threads. Still, one guy has a studiously ambivalent and popular podcast series about the crime and now apparently a retrial. The other one had a hugely favourable plea deal that he didn't take. It just doesn't seem like a comparable set of circumstances.
>I enjoyed Serial but, later read critiques of how the Serial podcast was making entertainment out of someone's actual life and another person's actual murder.
I don't fault Serial for that because Sarah Koening and the team were very respectful - and there is nothing wrong with telling a crime story.
I did find the way people were discussing it online was offputting, for the reasons you stated.
It's highly likely that he did it taking all evidence into consideration, but there is a small amount of doubt. Who defines what is reasonable? Either way, 17 years in prison for a crime of passion at 17 is probably enough
The main alibi was that he was in the library where he would sometimes check his email after school. Question: Why can't they ask whoever his email provider was if there's record of him signing in after school? Why didn't they ask the library if they kept logs on the computers? If a court asked yahoo for some sort of log record from 1999 would they even have it? I suspect they would. Would adnan even remember his email address from then?
If they asked for those records now? Not a chance. Yahoo's webmail infrastructure has undoubtedly changed numerous times in the last 17 years; there's absolutely no way they would have bothered to retain IP address logs across all of those migrations.
I remember hearing (I can't remember where) they contacted the ISP and they no longer had logs or maybe even the email account. There was some funny-business too, if I remember.
I work in film. Once the delivery is out the door the 'pieces' are generally archived, but even a few months later they don't fit together again. Trying to recreate the data when working on a sequel, for instance, even only a year later is a bit like the restoring the Xerox Alto series posted last week.
I've had the same problem in game development. A few years after you've shipped a game, you can't build tje source code any more because it's dependent on tools that aren't supported any more. It's not quite that bad, but true preservability is hard because all the tools need to be preserved too.
As someone who was an adult and working with computers in 1999 the first thing that comes to mind is that storage was way more expensive back then. I remember paying a ton of money around then for an Iomega ZIP drive that held 160MB on disks that cost $99 each if I recall correctly. The idea that massive amounts of inconsequential log data with little business purpose from that era is just lying around is not very plausible.
>If a court asked yahoo for some sort of log record from 1999 would they even have it? I suspect they would.
I don't think they would today.
But you raise a good point. The investigation was sloppy. For example, the alibi of the then current boyfriend of Hae, turned out to be forged, but none of the investigators bothered to follow-up on it. The library had video cameras, with copies held for a few weeks, again the investigators never bothered following up on those either.
Fair. They could retry but I can't see how. They don't really have anything. Jay is a terrible witness and he won't hold up in a cross, given the amount of times he changed his story (the latest being his intercept interview last year). Cell tower evidence is questionable and their expert witness recinded his testimony. The timeline has never been solid and is even more of a mess after Undisclosed.
If they retry what evidence will they bring to the table?
What if they let him walk now, and then in 5 years stumble into evidence that could get him convicted. Could they retry him later? If so, that seems like a better strategy than jumping into a retrial now with what is apparently not enough of a case to re-convict.
IANAL, but I don't believe that's possible. The clock started ticking when they brought the original charges, and I don't think they can stop it now just because possible evidence may come out later.
Uh, guys. Fifth Amendment. Double jeopardy. No person shall "be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb." In plain terms, you can't (in general) be tried again for the same crime after you are acquitted.
It wasn't a felony murder, so it can't even be tried in a different jurisdiction (federal). The protection isn't altered when new evidence comes to light.
They already convicted him, so they could just leave him in prison instead of risking double jeopardy. What I'm curious about is whether they can release him without a new trial and without anything like an acquittal, basically resetting to "investigation" status indefinitely. It doesn't seem like the right to a speedy trial would be violated, since he would be free and not part of a prosecution during that time, which would likely be forever.
This (mis)reading of 5A would seem to preclude all retrials. The judge vacated the previous verdict. It no longer exists. The retrial, whenever it occurs, will be single jeopardy.
If the retrial doesn't happen soon (rather, soon after the appeals process is done), the State will be obliged to release Syed. Actually he might get bail in the meantime anyway.
Double jeopardy is irrelevant in this instance, as it generally is in instances where a judge orders a new trial. Had it gotten to the point where a jury actually acquitted him it would be a different story, but that didn't happen.
According to Twitter[0] the state of Maryland's office of the attorney general will appeal the decision for a retrial.
I think you're right though. If they do appeal it and fail they'll just let him walk, but are going to continue to this as long as they can to keep him in there as long as possible.
The state can appeal this decision, and I'd think they surely will do that. I don't know enough about law to know what their odds of succeeding would be.
Beyond that? The evidence against him was a good deal less sketchy than Serial made it sound, but I still don't know if it would be enough to get a conviction sixteen years later.. so who knows.
It's really hard to answer that question without writing a couple thousand words about different things, honestly. Many (most?) of us in this thread have 10 or so hours of information about this case just from listening to Serial, so it's hard to provide a genuine response to that without spending quite a bit of time talking. I don't have the time to write that, and I honestly doubt you have the time to read it.
That said, let's just start with the central premise of Serial E1: that it's hard to remember details of a day six weeks before, and that's why Adnan has trouble telling the cops what he needed to know. Remember, this is a day when his ex-girlfriend disappears and a police officer called him about it, but we're supposed to assume that nothing in that series of events is a big enough deal to stamp a few things (even just things related to Hae) in his memory.
Furthermore, if we assume that it's easier to remember something that happened same-day, we can assume that he asked Hae for a ride home from school - per what he told the officer the day of - something that he now denies. He did this, of course, despite the fact that he had a perfectly working car in the school's parking lot at that moment.
.. and so on. Like I said, it's really hard to start dealing with all of the claims made by various people at various times, but there's a number of ways to view the facts in a (to paraphrase Sarah Koenig) "bad for Adnan" way that aren't at all sketcky.
The state's problem is that they haven't put forward a plausible timeline. The timeline they used during the original trial is almost certainly wrong since Jay changed his story when he did the intercept interview.
Are you charging him with murder or lying to the police? A weak or even shattered alibi still leaves him with a presumption of innocence which the prosecution must overcome beyond a reasonable doubt.
I mean, I'm charging him with neither - I'm not advocating for his conviction, I'm just a dude commenting on an internet forum. There's much more evidence where that came from, but that statement cuts into the central premise of Serial S1E1 (particularity of the first few minutes), which is why I picked that to start with.
The problem (and the point I'm trying to make) is that there's this sort of "Adnan was convicted by bad evidence" type of myth that the entirety of the Internet seems to believe because that's what a podcast says. In reality, a jury of his peers, after listening to the case in full, decided to convict the guy. Unanimously. I don't know if the guy is guilty or not, but it hits me as a little silly that the entire world has decided that they know better than the jury because we listened to a podcast. There's at least some reason to read that as "Serial didn't provide a totally unbiased story" not "wow, it's good that we are all so much smarter than the people who looked at the evidence in its entirety in the courtroom".
I listened to the whole series and ended up feeling he was guilty. Then I felt annoyed with the project. I'd spent all these hours getting familiar with a killer. What a result from this project - maybe a guilty man will get out of prison.
The "Double Jeopardy" rule only appeals to prosecution. It doesn't mean you can't appeal your case. In the US we have a system that was designed to prevent false convictions, even at the cost of some criminals going free. That's why we have the "Double Jeopardy" rule, innocent until proven guilty, pleading the fifth, ect.
It wasn't a podcast, it was the collective expression of disbelief when the story of how someone was convicted with such shaky evidence and sub-par representation. "If it happened to that guy, it can happen to me."
Stuff White People Like is a bit offensive to some people. Probably not great to link to it.
I can see that, as such, I redacted my post. Sorry if I offended anybody.
Upon further examination, that "disbelief" seems to be underscored by the fact that Serial was really after a nugget of definitive evidence against Adnan -- for someone to come in and say, "I SAW this and that, and Anand is guilty."
If anything, such plans backfired for Serial, and I'm glad they did because a podcast shouldn't attempt to manipulate mass numbers of people's emotions to sway popular opinion in order to manipulate justice "ex post facto." To be clear, instead uncovering their "smoking gun," as pixel says, that is the nail in the coffin for Adnan being guilty, he is now getting retried for innocence because of the very shaky evidence in the first place that would have served as the impetus for a mass witch hunt for the keystone.
It's as equally appalling and repulsive as the situation I originally described in my redacted post, and realize that the Stuff White People Like reference was more of an observation of our culture's very real problems with bias and others' beliefs ("Damsel in Distress" and "yellow fever") and behaviors (as sad and offensive as they may be) which has led to the aforementioned mass pitchforking I described earlier, rather than a representation of my OWN internal beliefs. Quite frankly, I am a bit offended that you couldn't at least give me that benefit of the doubt before jumping to such conclusions. My points still stand regardless of if and how offended people are by its contents (and it actually supports my argument if they are).
Fact of the matter is that it IS just a podcast (and shouldn't be misconstrued in ways that cause it to become a "perversion of justice" as so many have), and the fact that you interpret it as more than such might convince me that you're part of the problem as well. Not only that, it's arguably an abuse of the media to attempt to infringe on one's Fifth Amendment rights (imagine if Adnan HADN'T been convicted or if he had received LESS than a life sentence or if he was under consideration for retrial with a potential death sentence!).
There's a very good reason people stay out of the limelight as much as possible whenever they're in trial.
> Serial was really after a nugget of definitive evidence against Adnan -- for someone to come in and say, "I SAW this and that, and Anand is guilty."
No. I didn't get that sense at all. I think Sarah Koening tried to present this story in an objective and fair way. There is no way she set out to prove Adnan was guilty - for one thing, he was already in prison serving a life sentence and had one of his appeals denied.
>I am a bit offended that you couldn't at least give me that benefit of the doubt before jumping to such conclusions.
You use inflammatory language and argue in support of controversial points - it's tough to figure out exactly what you're talking about, much less give you some benefit of the doubt.
Calling it general entertainment pop culture misses the entire point of why it's interesting and honestly, it's quite self limiting to have such a perspective.
Try to open your walls up a bit man and soak up the complexities of culture and the laws we live in.
I have to fight the hipster in me too, but Serial is an example of something that is deservedly popular. It was very entertaining, yes, but very informative. I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to know more about criminal justice.
There's even a tech angle: As a former engineer for a wireless phone company, I thought the explanation of how technical data is used and abused for securing legal convictions to be mind blowing.
>I'm a bit at a loss as to why general entertainment pop culture news is interesting to hackers.
Because hackers are people, and by definition a significant proportion of people are interested in pop culture.
But that does bring up a good point that "anything that good hackers would find interesting" is perhaps not the best guidance for what's "on-topic" on HN.
For me it's interesting because getting to the truth in a complicated case is like debugging to find and fix a single specific bug in a large codebase. But I'm also weird in that debugging is one of my favorite parts of the development process.
edit: grammar, and obligatory link to the website for the first season, which itself is a great example of online journalism in how pieces of evidence discussed on the show were also uploaded with further explanatory writing: https://serialpodcast.org/season-one/1/the-alibi
One of my favorite bits was the lengths the producers went to confirm whether or not Best Buy had a payphone 15 years ago. The show, IMO, also served as a great example of how to do investigative research and is a must-listen for aspiring journalists for that reason alone.