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.<p>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: <a href="https://serialpodcast.org/season-one/1/the-alibi" rel="nofollow">https://serialpodcast.org/season-one/1/the-alibi</a><p>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 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 <i>that one sequence of events</i> 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.
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.<p>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.
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?<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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?
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.