Did the Serial Podcast Affect Adnan Syed's Trial?
On March 10, HBO will premiere The Case Against Adnan Syed, a four-part documentary series delving into the 1999 murder of Baltimore high-school student Hae Min Lee, and the confusion and controversy that surrounds it some 20 years later. You've probably already heard this story: The man accused of killing Lee, her ex-boyfriend Adnan Syed, was the subject of the mega-hit podcast Serial, which captivated the world with its dramatic investigation into those still-murky particulars, and had your coworkers play-acting CSI. But if you missed it-or you just need a quick refresher on its many tangles-here's everything you need to know.
What is the Serial podcast?
Serial is a podcast that was spun off from the popular public radio program This American Life. It's co-created and hosted by Sarah Koenig, a former reporter for The New York Times and Baltimore Sun. Combining investigative journalism with long-form storytelling-plus a soupcon of old-fashioned radio drama, and one hell of a catchy theme song-it quickly became the podcast everyone with a Macbook and a mic aspires to emulate upon its debut in 2014. The Peabody Award-winning first season racked up a world record for downloads, and it soon had everyone, even people who had never heard of a "podcast" before, playing amateur sleuth on the case of Adnan Syed.
Who is Adnan Syed?
The subject of Serial's first season was convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend, 18-year-old Hae Min Lee, in 1999, when they were both in high school. After Lee's body was found strangled and partially buried in Baltimore's Leakin Park, police received an anonymous phone call implicating Syed. The subsequent investigation and criminal trials hinged largely on some dubious interpretation of cell phone records, as well as the ever-shifting testimony of a possible witness/accessory of even more dubious reliability. Meanwhile, Syed himself was never permitted to testify in court. All of these factors-combined with the portrait that his acquaintances paint of a popular kid, star athlete, and all-around nice guy who would never hurt anyone-raised plenty of skepticism about whether he really could have carried out such a brutal crime, even before the show. Nevertheless, Syed was handed a life sentence in 2000. He appears throughout Serial in a series of taped phone interviews from prison, in which he continues to maintain his innocence.
Who else was involved in Adnan Syed's trial?
Part of Serial's rabbit-hole appeal is its large cast of colorful supporting characters, each of them factoring into the story in ways that are slowly revealed across its eight episodes,-and requiring one of those classic “red string boards” to keep straight. Besides Syed and Lee, the main players to be familiar with include: Jay, Syed's occasional pot-smoking pal, who provided the only direct evidence against Syed when he told police he'd helped him to bury Lee's body; Jay's close friend Jennifer, who similarly told police (eventually) that Jay had confessed to her, after her number mysteriously turned up in Syed's call logs; and Don, Lee's older boyfriend, who worked with her at Lenscrafters, and whose own alibi that day is slightly questionable. There’s also Cristina Gutierrez, the late defense attorney whose botched representation of Syed formed the basis of several appeals he later made to his conviction. It also left plenty of room for Serial and its legion of earbud detectives to try to get to the bottom of what really happened.
So what did really happen in Serial?
As thousands of still-raging Reddit threads will confirm, we still don't know for sure. Serial begins with the presumption of Syed's innocence raised by attorney Rabia Chaudry, a childhood friend of Syed who brought the case to Koenig. Over its run, the show casts plenty of doubt on the official version of events, uncovering myriad contradictions in just about everyone's testimonies, particularly Jay’s, and it reveals just how much of the prosecution relied on those fuzzy, possibly falsified memories, as well as some potentially misinterpreted cellphone data. It also uncovers some inexplicably unexplored angles-including a potential alibi for Syed who was never even interviewed-and explores how Syed being Muslim may have also contributed to juror bias. Still, it doesn't completely absolve him, either. Also, seemingly everyone in this tangled web has some kind of suspicious side story, even the guy who happened to discover Lee's body (a convicted public streaker who claims he was just looking for a place to pee). By the end of the season, Koenig herself says she's no closer to understanding what actually happened, and nearly five years after it wrapped, neither are we.
What effect did Serial have on Adnan Syed's case?
By the time Serial's first season ended in 2014, Syed already had an appeal waiting before a higher court. In 2016, it finally reached a Baltimore judge who vacated Syed's conviction, then ordered a new trial for Syed based on reexamining that flimsy cellphone evidence and his attorney’s failure to interview a classmate, Asia McClain, who told Koenig that she saw Syed in the library at the time of the murder. Whether Syed will actually get that new trial is currently tied up in the Court of Appeals, which has pledged to deliver its final decision no later than August 31, 2019. It's safe to say that the overwhelming popular interest in Serial has made reopening the investigation-and seeking some kind of closure to this utter mess-a genuine cause célèbre that shows no sign of abating, no matter what the board actually decides.
What other impact has Serial had?
In addition to HBO’s The Case Against Adnan Syed, which reexamines both the original story and its post-Serial aftermath, the show has spawned an Investigation Discovery special, as well as two books on Syed from Rabia Chaudry and Asia McClain. Chaudry also hosts her own podcast on the subject, Undisclosed. It's also fueled an ongoing debate over the case that continues to sprawl across the internet-including one regarding the role Serial and Koenig may have played in obfuscating or even exploiting it. And while subsequent seasons of Serial have so far failed to take off in quite the same way, that first season instantly made the show a paragon of the podcasting form, inspiring myriad copycats and parodies. It’s also greatly contributed to an overall craze for true-crime stories, across all formats. Like the mystery of what happened to Hae Min Lee, this, too, is far from over.
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