September 20, 2022 - 5:57pm
Yesterday, a Baltimore judge vacated the conviction of Adnan Syed for the 1999 murder of his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, when both were high-school students. A combination of prosecutorial misconduct, ineffective counsel from Syed’s defence lawyers, and the discovery of “new evidence”, according to the judge, had caused the state to “lose confidence in the integrity of the conviction.” Syed has been released after 23 years in prison, pending a decision by prosecutors on whether or not to re-try the case.
Syed, of course, is no ordinary criminal — he was the star of season one of Serial, a 2014 podcast that drew millions of listeners and nearly single-handedly launched the current booms in both podcasting and prestige true-crime content. And he was the subject of a follow-on documentary from HBO, The Case Against Adnan Syed. Until yesterday, Syed was likely the best-known convicted murderer in America.
While Serial never flatly asserted that Syed was innocent, the upshot of its coverage was clear enough — the prosecution’s case had holes, the defence lawyer was incompetent, and the evidence was not enough to send Syed away for life. As series lead Sarah Koenig told the New York Times this morning:
And so this kid goes to prison for life at 18, based on a story that wasn’t accurate. That’s what we wanted people to think about: even setting aside the question of Adnan’s guilt or innocence, are we OK with a system that operates like that?
Indeed, this kind of can’t-prove-a-negative question-begging has been par for the course in the media coverage of Syed’s case. It is reflected in the judge’s motion to vacate, which relied heavily on the storylines forwarded by both the podcast and the HBO series.
The tactic, generally speaking, has been to lead with an extremely strong version of the defence’s case, chin-stroking meditations about the unreliability of human memory and the problems of the criminal justice system, and humanising interviews with and about Syed. Then you present a watered-down version of the prosecution’s case, zeroing in on minor points of uncertainty that are irrelevant to the question of guilt but seed doubts as to the reliability of any evidence in the case. You toss in vague innuendo about prosecutorial misconduct, racial bias, and incompetent defence. Then you throw up your hands and say, “Well, he may have killed her, but who can really say, and should we really have a justice system that sends people away based on less-than-certain evidence?”
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SubscribeThank You for caring about the voiceless, murdered teenage girl – Hae Min Lee – and her family, who have been re traumatized by this circus.
Victims are just not fashionable enough for the “woke” to give a damn about.
Exactly! When I saw the headline, I thought, “Well at least Hae Min got 23 years of justice.”
I started out listening to the podcast thinking he was innocent, and of course you can feel Koenig pushing you at every step to find him innocent. The more I heard, the more I was convinced he was guilty. At the end I was horrified that people were trying to get him out of prison.
The ten-thousand-dollar question is whether Syed will now sue the state of Maryland for wrongful imprisonment (and whether HBO will make a special about Syed’s “Quest for Justice”).
The ten billion dollar question is who actually strangled to death a teenage girl named Hae Min Lee and buried her body like an animal?
It’s her family that should sue.
Will a podcast be made about them or their murdered family member?
The Left disgusts me: I was a Democrat for my entire life, but these sheltered people so completely romanticize criminals that I can no longer vote for them.
Movng forward, I will vote for the law & order candidates: the Republicans.
I too believe he is most likely guilty. I have read, listened and watched everything on this case. For me the HBO doc is the most troublesome because it is highly favorable to him and yet he still offered no memories of the day, no answers (I mean why even give him a doc?). All that time to come up with something, anything, he offers nothing. Because there is nothong he can say that wont be disproved.
Personally, I think there’s a good chance he’s guilty, though perhaps with reasonable doubt. I didn’t sit through the trial though, so my opinion counts for nothing.
However to blame a podcast for getting him out of jail is slightly bizarre. Yes, without the podcast he wouldn’t have had the publicity to even get a hearing, but the conviction was quashed on the basis of the prosecution. They are the ones that broke the law and withheld exculpatory evidence, not Sarah Koenig. They were the ones who misrepresented the cell phone tower evidence, not a journalist.
Anyway, they are free to attempt another prosecution, though it seems unlikely given the amount of time and the lack of DNA evidence against him.
Quite. It’s as if the author hasn’t taken the time to actually discover what happened at the hearing and what the prosecution is now saying — it don’t have confidence in the verdict, and it has diddly-squat to to do with a near decade-old podcast.
The author also asks if a criminal justice system should convict on less-than-certain evidence, and answers by saying yes. Well, reasonable doubt means the evidence should be almost certain. Koenig, I don’t believe, is arguing for anything more than that. All she contends is that the evidence convicting Syed falls short of that. And the prosecution and judge think so, too.
For what it’s worth, there wasn’t a Brady violation, at least not officially. The evidence was turned over to Syed’s defense attorneys. It is at best, an alleged violation that has been disputed by the AG. https://thedailyrecord.com/2022/09/30/baltimore-states-attorneys-office-clashes-with-ag-over-release-of-key-document-in-syed-case/
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Normally when a prosecutor seeks to drop charges, I take that very seriously and consider it as good as an exoneration. However, the prosecutor in this case is a former public defender and activist that isn’t connected to the original case. She’s also a lame duck facing legal troubles of her own (charges that include perjury). Other state prosecutors and the AG (who are also Democrats) have gently yet openly questioned the timing of her decision to drop charges (she needs good publicity for her upcoming legal battles). As many others have said, a retrial obviously wasn’t going to happen because she was fully in the tank.
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Ironically, perhaps the only significant legal mishandling that seems to have occurred was when Hae Min Lee’s family were not given adequate notice of a new hearing by the defense, something they are now seeking legal action for.
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I think it’s great that we look into cases to try to find wrongful convictions, which I’m sure do happen. As a liberal I have strongly believed in this cause my whole life. However, the way this played out probably did more harm than good. It comes across as mob-rule rather than true justice. I know at least for me and probably thousands of others who paid close attention here, this episode has left us feeling disillusioned. Letting murders out on a technicality, arguably a false one at that, is only creating more injustice.
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I also worry that not all, but many of the people involved have shown themselves to have troubling views regarding the abolition of prisons in general. It strikes me that they are more motivated by forming grand narratives than for pursuing justice.
Perhaps a key issue here is the extent to which our ‘entertainment culture’ and its voracious need for material that it can present in ever more engaging ways is giving us a distorted view of reality and – this may be the new part – the enthusiasm with which those of us who consume this entertainment want to believe ‘a good story’ and lack the skepticism and intellectual rigor to recognize the blurry but critical boundary between entertainment and reality, fact and fantasy, and truth and fiction. There is sort of conspiracy here between those who make entertainment and those who consume it, with neither honestly recognizing the destructive effect that this conspiracy has on our society and on civilization.
But how much weight should we give Jay Wilds’ testimony?
Apparently, the jury who actually heard his testimony gave it enough weight to convict Syed.
The bottom line is this: if he didn’t do it, who did? A teenage girl named Hae Min Lee was strangled to death.
Who will put any comparable energy into giving justice to the Lee family?
Has a family been re traumatized for political reasons? For entertainment purposes?
Trial by podcast is far more sketchy than anything our justice system currently does.
The devil is really in the detail on this one, and you decided not to mention any of it. The stuff about prosecutorial conduct isn’t at all “vague” as you are claiming, for example.
I actually hadn’t realised how closely this case had become linked to culture wars, so it’s very interesting now 8 years after Serial and 23 years after the event to see that played out in all the standard scripts, as you do above, and in some of the comments too.
Listen to the first series of Undisclosed podcast. That explains what the author doesn’t understand about the unreliability of the evidence used to convict.