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Thread: Serial: The Podcast

  1. #1
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    Default Serial: The Podcast

    http://serialpodcast.org/about
    On January 13, 1999, a girl named Hae Min Lee, a senior at Woodlawn High School in Baltimore County, Maryland, disappeared. A month later, her body turned up in a city park. She'd been strangled. Her 17-year-old ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed, was arrested for the crime, and within a year, he was convicted and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison. The case against him was largely based on the story of one witness, Adnan’s friend Jay, who testified that he helped Adnan bury Hae's body. But Adnan has always maintained he had nothing to do with Hae’s death. Some people believe he’s telling the truth. Many others don’t.

    Sarah Koenig, who hosts Serial, first learned about this case more than a year ago. In the months since, she's been sorting through box after box (after box) of legal documents and investigators' notes, listening to trial testimony and police interrogations, and talking to everyone she can find who remembers what happened between Adnan Syed and Hae Min Lee fifteen years ago. What she realized is that the trial covered up a far more complicated story, which neither the jury nor the public got to hear. The high school scene, the shifting statements to police, the prejudices, the sketchy alibis, the scant forensic evidence - all of it leads back to the most basic questions: How can you know a person’s character? How can you tell what they’re capable of? In Season One of Serial, she looks for answers.
    http://www.theage.com.au/entertainme...17-11o9ex.html
    It's not often that a podcast makes international headlines. The latest project from public radio darling This American Life, dubbed Serial, has broken records, soaring up the iTunes charts to the top spot in the United States, Australia, Canada and Britain, as well as becoming the fastest to reach 5 million downloads.

    The true crime story has been compared to The Wire, In Cold Blood and Charles Dickens, as well as spawning a recap podcast, dozens of regular recaps and a parody podcast, becoming a cultural phenomenon in its own right.

    The legal case has been reopened by US prosecutors as a result of the podcast. But as the show approaches its ninth episode, big ethical questions have not been answered.

    Serial is a cold case investigation into the 1999 Balitmore County murder of 18-year old Hae Min Lee, a crime for which her former boyfriend and schoolmate, Adnan Syed, was convicted and jailed.

    Narrator and reporter Sarah Koenig spends each episode excavating and weighing up evidence and testimony from the old case as well as talking to the friends and family of Syed, associate "Jay" and Min Lee.

    Koenig, who has been working on the story for a year, says she is only "two weeks ahead" of listeners.

    She also says her task is not to exonerate Syed, but to discover the truth.

    The biggest question raised about Serial is whether we should be hooked on it at all. The person at the centre of the case, Hae Min Lee, has barely rated a mention. Her family have been even more absent and the only details listeners are afforded about Min Lee come from her high school best friend and a personal journal submitted to the court.

    The format of the podcast, a creative non-fiction, is designed to make listeners hang out for the next episode, much like an HBO series. A section of the website Reddit devoted to the case has drawn thousands of obsessed amateurs attempting to solve the case before Koenig does.

    Such elements would , in themselves, be remarkable, but combined with the extraordinary absence of the victim and her family, some have described it as a silencing. Were there other ways for Hae's life to be remembered in this podcast?

    Koenig has implied she has been unable to talk to Lee's family because of the trauma, but seems equally baffled that the case has drawn so much attention.

    "I've been intrigued by a lot of stories in my career, but I think a tonne of the interest is because this is a crime. It's a murder case. This sounds naive, but I didn't think that would be a thing. I didn't see it," she told Time.

    Another major criticism is the handling of racial issues. The key players in the case are non-white. Min Lee's family is Korean-American, accused Syed's family is Pakistani-American and Muslim, while witness "Jay" is black. Baltimore has a huge black and multicultural population, communities in which Koenig has been accused of being a cultural interloper.

    Syed's friend, Rabia Chaudry, who brought the case to Koenig, said the race issues had been underplayed.

    "You have an urban jury in Baltimore city, mostly African-American, maybe people who identify with Jay [an African-American friend of Syed's who is the state's star witness] more than Adnan, who is represented by a community in headscarves and men in beards," Chaudry said.

    "The visuals of the courtroom itself leave an impression and there's no escaping the racial implications there," she said.

    Serial has revolutionised the podcast, even enticing advertisers to take the genre more seriously. As any child pop star will attest, a rapid rise to fame guarantees equally forceful questioning. With four episodes of Serial left, Koenig has plenty of opportunity to answer her critics.
    I've just started listening to this, and it's really fascinating.

  2. #2
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    Wow, no replies at all?

    I've been pretty much obsessed with Serial since its debut and the various side podcasts like Undisclosed: http://undisclosed-podcast.com/ Surprised there's been no discussion of this huge cultural event-like thing, and with stories about the case coming in regularly now, like this:

    http://www.vulture.com/2015/08/adnan...dence-bad.html
    Adnan Syed's defense attorney filed a motion to the court Monday officially challenging questionable cell-phone evidence used more than a decade ago to convict his client of murder. The Baltimore Sun reports that in the supplement, C. Justin Brown, whose firm represents the "Serial" podcast star and his post-conviction petition, cites an old AT&T fax cover sheet accompanying phone records that reads: "Outgoing calls only are reliable for location status. Any incoming calls will NOT be considered reliable information for location." The note is significant because the prosecution used only incoming calls as a method to place Syed with the body of his slain ex-girlfriend in 1999. "We feel that the fax cover sheet from AT&T is an extremely important piece of evidence and we are bringing it to the court's attention as quickly as possible," Brown told the Sun.

    Brown reportedly believes this new evidence could enforce the case to overturn Syed's conviction because the phone data — a major facet of the prosecution's strategy, which was paired with acquaintance Jay Wilds's account of the event — should've been inadmissible. "The state argues, time and time again, that Jay Wilds' story is corroborated by the cellular tower evidence," Brown wrote in the filing. Brown adds this to the list of reasons why supporters believe Syed deserves to have a new trial, including the facts that alibi witness Asia McClain was never approached for testimony and that his former defense attorney might not have been fully competent during the trial. At time of publication, there was no word from the Attorney General's Office.

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    pablo...I moderated at a similar site for too many years. May I suggest that you modify "Fedric Station" to allow Podcasts.
    All that's left of what we were is what we have become.

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    That's up to our higher-ups.

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    http://www.vulture.com/2015/09/seria...a-tv-show.html
    Serial is set to become a TV series: The Lego Movie duo Phil Lord and Chris Miller are adapting Sarah Koenig's hit investigative podcast for Fox 21 Television Studios (so Fox's TV production company, not the network), with Koenig, Ira Glass, and their "This American Life" team serving as executive producers on the show. The scripted series won't follow the Adnan Syed case involving the murder of Hae Min Lee, but will instead take a more behind-the-scenes approach that details how Koenig went from virtual anonymity to creating one of 2014's biggest cultural phenomenons. Essentially, it'll be a TV show about a podcast. Recently, it was confirmed that the second season of "Serial" will investigate the disappearance of Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, who was held captive by the Taliban for five years after walking off his base in Afghanistan.

  6. #6
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    Those "enjoying" Making a Murderer (and maybe The Jinx as well) and who skipped the first season of Serial because it's a podcast need to give it a chance. And the follow-up Undisclosed podcast is even more mind-blowing.

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    Just listened to Serial, and it was definitely captivating. Went through the whole season in 2 days. I'm really not sure whether I think Adnan was guilty or innocent but the case was very interesting, and I can't believe that he was convicted on how little they had on him. The fact that Jay's statement kept changing to go along with what the police said, that he got no jail time for his possible involvement, and the craziest thing, that Adnan's defense never called his alibi to the stand. It's a shame how our justice system works sometimes.

    But some good news is that he was just granted a new trial! http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/01/us...rial.html?_r=0
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    Between Tim and Sid, Talk Is Jericho, Top Turnbuckle, Maddox, The Dick Show...I hardly fit my podcasts in as it is or I'd check it out
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    That's my problem too, I have so many others that I listen to but I finally gave it a listen and was hooked. I think it's only 12 episodes long, so at least there's an end and it's not a huge ongoing commitment to make.
    Only the gentle are ever really strong.

  10. #10
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    I was surprised this topic didn't get more action when it was originally ongoing. Serial was such a sensation, it was everywhere.

    The story is unbelievable and it's told so masterfully you cannot help but binge it. And then the Undisclosed podcast came out and blew the roof off the case. I'm sure this will be a movie or a series one day, but looks like HBO's The Night Of has a very similar vibe.

  11. #11
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    Just finishing a binge of S-Town, the new podcast by the producers of Serial and This American Life, and it's really engaging. Very highly recommend: http://www.vulture.com/2017/03/revie...st-serial.html

  12. #12
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    Not news but just some updates since I posted last, in case anyone's wondering (probably not):

    http://www.esquire.com/entertainment...-release-date/
    Here's the bad news: Serial's feverishly anticipated third season probably isn't coming until the new year. The good news? It's delayed because the production team are busy working on a whole lot more podcasts, one of which launches next week.

    Producer Julie Snyder revealed the tentative date for Serial's third season to Esquire.com during a conversation about the This American Life team's upcoming podcast S-Town, which will be the first show to launch under their new production banner, Serial Productions.

    "I'm the worst at predicting this, and I will give you my totally honest answer: I would think maybe not even until the beginning of 2018," Snyder said. "I don't like to run the show over Christmas… so to get it done by Christmas we would have to launch in October, and I bet that won't happen." Snyder has been working full-time on S-Town for the past six months, where Serial host and co-creator Sarah Koenig has also been helping out. "It's been a little bit slow going on Serial Season Three, but [Sarah's] kicking it in," Snyder continued. "She's working hard."

    S-Town, the subject matter of which has been kept tightly under wraps, will be released in full next Tuesday (March 28). The show begins with a man from small town Alabama reaching out to the This American Life's Brian Reed, asking him to investigate a local man who was allegedly "bragging that he got away with murder." Shortly after Reed agreed to investigate, the synopsis for the show teases, "someone else ended up dead, and another story began to unfold–about a nasty feud, a hunt for hidden treasure and the mysteries of one man's life."
    http://www.nme.com/news/serial-seaso...ferent-2091694
    Serial creator Ira Glass has teased the show’s third season in a new interview.

    Speaking to Rolling Stone, the radio host behind the hit podcast has revealed that the plot behind the show’s third iteration is “not a case”. Serial seasons one and two both focussed on newsworthy criminal cases.

    In season two, we tried to get away from true crime. We felt we already did that,” Glass explains. “Season two was about Bowe Bergdahl, a really different kind of story. We were looking at something that had news-and-issues stakes to it, but with the same narrative drive and characters to it. Season three takes on something huge and different with characters and narrative but very different from the first two seasons.”

    Glass also explains that the success of Serial took him by surprise.

    “I would like to say that we knew it was going to be popular, but we didn’t,” Glass continues. “We really just saw it as a little side project. We had no idea that 14 million people would download every episode. No podcast had ever done that. No podcast had ever had a parody of it on Saturday Night Live. It wasn’t a mainstream product like that. That was a turning point in 2014 for podcasts.”

    Meanwhile, Adnan Syed – the subject of the first series of Serial – has asked to be released from prison as he awaits his retrial.

    Syed was imprisoned for the murder of ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee in 1999 and has been serving a life sentence ever since. His conviction has proved controversial since forming the basis of the first season of Serial in 2014, which looked at the alleged inconsistencies in his trial.

    In October last year, Syed’s lawyer Justin Brown filed a motion arguing that Syed should be released because he poses “no danger to the community” and that he has already served 17 years in prison “based on an unconstitutional conviction for a crime he did not commit”.

    “Completely absent from Syed’s record are circumstances that typically cause courts concern regarding pretrial release,” Brown added, continuing to state that “there is no reason to think Adnan would run from the case he has spent half his life trying to disprove”.
    https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/3/1...l-podcast-coda
    After a bombshell debut that captured the attention of millions, the popular Serial podcast turned to a new topic for its second season: the case of Private First Class Bowe Bergdahl, who famously walked off an outpost in Afghanistan and spent five years in Taliban custody. Over the course of the season, which stretched from December 2015 to March 2016, Serial took a closer look into Bergdahl’s motivations, and how the case became so polarizing in the United States.

    Today, Bergdahl’s case came to an end when a military judge passed down his sentence. He’ll be busted down to the rank of private, receive a dishonorable discharge, and have to pay $1,000 for the next ten months, but he won’t spend any time in prison. Serial now plans to release a coda to its second season in light of the new developments and give closure to its listeners. The update also highlights a structural problem with the highly popular podcast: Each season jumps into an ongoing story with detailed reporting, but ends before the narrative reaches a conclusion.

    In 2014, Serial’s first season followed the story of Adnan Syed, who was accused of murdering his high school ex-girlfriend in 1999. The podcast took a deep dive into the murder case, reexamining old evidence and discovering some issues and inconsistencies related to the conviction. While the podcast attracted millions of listeners, its finale underwhelmed. There was no concrete, dramatic conclusion, just an admission that there were issues with the investigation and resulting conviction. The show’s second season came to rest in a similar place, posing interesting questions but ultimately leaving the story unresolved.

    Although Serial has offered occasional updates on the first and second seasons, these brief news flashes pale in comparison to the work that was put into the show’s original string of episodes. Meanwhile, there have been numerous developments in Bergdahl’s case that the program has barely touched, outside of the occasional retweet on Twitter.

    In both cases, Serial jumped into the midst of a story that was still unfolding, ultimately doing a disservice to those stories by presenting an incomplete narrative. This American Life’s more recent project, S-Town, took a slightly different path with a rich and complicated story that came to a conclusion before release, and thus offered a more complete narrative.

    Granted, Bergdahl’s case is a story that has taken years to unfold, and the team has shifted to their third season, which reportedly a huge and different. But Serial could still devote more resources to following their stories to their final conclusion, especially when their audience has already invested so much time in them.

    Ideally, this coda will help finish out the narrative for listeners who might not have kept up, looking back on the events that have transpired since the season ended in a year and a half ago. However, it will likely feel like a belated update, an admission that the show's producers haven't kept up with a story that has finally come to an end.

  13. #13
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    http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/mar...205-story.html
    Maryland’s second-highest court has upheld a judge’s ruling overturning the murder conviction of “Serial” podcast subject Adnan Syed.

    The decision remands the case back to Circuit Court, granting Syed a new trial there.

    The ruling could be appealed to the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, which would mean many more months before Syed finds out whether his conviction will remain or if he will get a new trial.

    Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh’s office said that it is “currently reviewing today’s decision to determine next steps.”

    Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby’s office would be tasked with prosecuting Syed were a retrial to move forward. Her office said it was reviewing the appeals court’s opinion on Thursday, but otherwise declined to comment.

    C. Justin Brown, Syed’s attorney, said he would be having a news conference Thursday afternoon.

    In writing the Court of Special Appeals opinion, which was released Thursday at 1 p.m., Chief Judge Patrick L. Woodward wrote that a “deficient performance” by Syed’s attorney during his initial trial — namely, her failure to call a witness named Asia McClain — “prejudiced Syed’s defense.”

    Syed was convicted in 2000 and sentenced to life in prison for the killing of his former girlfriend, Woodlawn High School classmate Hae Min Lee, whose body was found in Leakin Park.

    Syed maintained his innocence, and in 2014 his case attracted international attention when it was featured on the “Serial” podcast, which was downloaded millions of times and prompted legions of listeners to scrutinize the case online.

    Syed was granted a post-conviction hearing in February 2016, during which his new attorneys argued that his original counsel had failed to call McClain — now McClain Chapman — as an alibi witness. They also questioned the reliability of cellphone evidence used to place Syed at the spot where Lee's body was found.

    Four months later, retired Judge Martin Welch, who had denied Syed's previous request for a new trial, vacated his conviction and ordered a new trial. The judge said questions about the cellphone tower evidence should have been raised by Syed's original team.

    The state appealed a lower court judge’s ruling last year that vacated Syed's conviction and ordered a new trial. Syed's attorneys then filed a separate conditional appeal, asking the court to look at the alibi issue.

    In the opinion Thursday, Woodward found that, “there is a reasonable probability that McClain’s alibi testimony would have raised a reasonable doubt in the mind of at least one juror about Syed’s involvement [in] Hae’s murder, and thus ‘the result of the proceedings would have been different.’”

    The Court of Special Appeals had considered the case during a hearing last June.

    There, judges had focused more on the alibi witness angle, questioning attorneys for Syed and the state attorney general's office about what weight they should give to McClain Chapman, who claimed to have seen Syed at the Woodlawn library when prosecutors Lee was killed.

    "How can you possibly evaluate an alibi witness without speaking to her?" Woodward asked during the state's presentation by Thiru Vignarajah, a special assistant attorney general. Vignarajah referred questions to Frosh’s office on Thursday.

    The judges asked Brown, Syed's current attorney, whether there was any case law that would establish that Syed’s attorney, the late M. Cristina Gutierrez, provided ineffective counsel to Syed because she did not speak to McClain. 

    Judge Kathryn Grill Graeff asked Brown whether it is a defense attorney's responsibility to speak to any possible alibi witness — to which Brown said yes.

    In a dissent published alongside the court’s majority opinion issued Thursday, Graeff seemed to adopt the argument of the state that Gutierrez had good reason not to call McClain as a witness. Graeff noted records in the case, including a detective’s notes on communications between McClain and Syed, “indicate potential cause for concern regarding the trustworthiness of Ms. McClain’s alibi, and therefore, the reasonableness of counsel’s decision not to contact Ms. McClain or pursue her alibi.”

    Graeff wrote that, “To the extent that Ms. McClain’s potential alibi could give the prosecution ammunition to argue that Syed and Ms. McClain were working together to falsify an alibi, it would be a reasonable decision not to contact Ms. McClain to pursue that alibi.”

  14. #14
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    I would love to talk about the case here. Would anyone object? It would spoil the Serial and Undisclosed podcasts, so we could do it in a separate thread.

    Alternatively is there another forum where this is discussed?

    HBJ

  15. #15
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    This thread should be fine. It's not very active anyway, as you can see.

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    Cool. So much to talk about.

    I've only been aware of this whole thing for about six months, when I binge-listened to Serial, and then listened to the audiobook of Rabia Chaudry's book, "Adnan's Story". I'm now gradually listening through the Undisclosed podcast.

    I don't know whether Adnan is guilty or not, but I don't think he should have been found guilty beyond reasonable doubt. I won't summarize my entire thinking on this here, but essentially, while I don't think there is enough evidence to be sure that Adnan killed Hae, no other theory I've heard explains the evidence better, or makes as much sense.

    The key problem I see is Jay's testimony. If Adnan is innocent, what motive would Jay have for trying to frame Adnan? I've heard lots of theories - Jay wanting to stop Hae from telling Stephanie that Jay cheated on her, etc. - but none has any compelling evidence to support it.

    Rabia's theory about Jay's testimony is interesting: neither Adnan nor Jay were involved in Hae's murder, and Jay's testimony was fabricated by the Baltimore police to implicate Adnan, whom they already considered a suspect.

    According to Rabia, the police found Jay as the result of investigating the numbers on Adnan's cell phone record for Jan 13. They then discovered that Jay actually had Adnan's phone all day, that the cell phone record did not reflect Adnan's movements that day, and that Adnan may not have been near Leakin Park at all. They then (according to Rabia) decided to enlist Jay as a witness to testify that Jay was with Adnan, and that Adnan admitted to the murder, and Jay helped bury the body in Leakin Park. This explains why Jay's story changed over time to match the evidence that the police had, and why the police appeared to be coaching Jay during his recorded interview.

    Frankly, I think that's preposterous, if you consider it from the police's perspective.

    There are two very good reasons why the police would not have made up Jay's testimony, in my opinion.

    1) The police no longer had any knowledge of Adnan's movements on Jan 13, after school. For all they knew, Adnan was with a group of friends all afternoon, any of whom could have given him an alibi for the time he was allegedly with Jay. The police couldn't take the chance that the prosecution's case can be torpedo'ed so easily. Similarly, a defense witness could also place *Jay* somewhere other than where Jay claimed he was in his police-fabricated series of events. And again, that would have destroyed the police case. So making up movements for Adnan and Jay for that afternoon would have been way too risky for the police to do.

    2) Jay was a terrible witness. He couldn't remember things, he couldn't retain information he was given. If the police had tried to coach him to recount a fabricated story, they would soon have realized it wasn't going to work. He could barely keep a story straight; he would not have been credible.

    So if the police didn't fabricate the whole story, why did they spend so much time trying to change Jay's story to match the evidence they already had?

    I don't think they were coaching Jay to give their fabricated testimony. I think they were trying to strengthen Jay's own testimony.

    I think the reason that the police persisted with Jay as a witness was that the claim that Adnan killed Hae, and was with Jay that afternoon, came from Jay. So the police were invested in trying to make Jay a credible witness, because he confirmed their suspicion of Adnan's guilt, and claimed to have eyewitness testimony that implicated Adnan.

    However, I think that the police knew that Jay was lying about many of the details. He was either trying to protect himself or someone else, or couldn't remember that afternoon very well because he was high, or was just lying outright. The police couldn't tell which. So I think they fed him details about the cell phone record, or about the body, or the car location, in order to jog his memory or challenge his lies. They did this in the hope he would either eventually remember/admit to what really happened, and have testimony that matches the other evidence.

    What we hear on the tape is Jay trying to adapt his story to fit the other evidence, and the police getting exasperated because he's obviously just making stuff up - either because he can't really remember, or because he's lying. But they persevere, because they don't give up on a witness that claims to have seen what happened.

    Which brings us back to motive. If the claim that Adnan killed Hae originally came from Jay - even if the police greatly altered the details of Jay's testimony using other evidence - that's a big problem for Adnan. Because it's hard to see why Jay would implicate Adnan in that way.

    To be clear, I don't think that's enough to conclude that Adnan is guilty. It's certainly not enough to convict him. But it is enough to prevent me from concluding Adnan is innocent.

    HBJ

  17. #17
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    That's a really well thought-out post there. How much of Undisclosed have you gotten through?

  18. #18
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    Quote Originally Posted by mae View Post
    That's a really well thought-out post there. How much of Undisclosed have you gotten through?
    Thanks, although my post did get a bit out of hand. I'm currently listening to Episode 5 of the Undisclosed podcast, so still quite a bit to listen to. But I understand Rabia's book summarized much of the podcast content.

    HBJ

  19. #19
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    I've been listening to more and more of the Undisclosed podcast. I'm nearing the end, and I think it's okay, but not great.

    Part of the problem, I think, is that it lacks focus. At various times, the hosts appear to be:
    - trying to show that Adnan is innocent
    - trying to show that Adnan should not have been found guilty at trial
    - trying to show that there are legal grounds for a retrial

    Rather than address these questions separately, the hosts talk about all three at the same time - seemingly interchangeably. So it's some hard to tell why a particular point is being raised or topic is being discussed. Sometimes they are talking about whether something could or could not have actually happened. Sometimes they are talking about the strength or weakness of the prosecution' case, as if they were defending Adnan themselves. And sometimes they discuss whether specific evidence should have been admitted to trial, or whether Adnan's lawyer was negligent.

    Most listeners, I think, want to know what actually happened to Hae. But much of the discussion is not about that - it's about whether the police were honest, about whether the prosecution demonstrated Adnan's guilt, or about whether he was adequately defended, or about whether the trial was fair.

    So it's a bit unsatidfying, over all.

  20. #20
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    http://www.comingsoon.net/tv/news/94...-coming-to-hbo
    HBO and Sky have announced a new four-hour documentary series, The Case Against Adnan Syed, directed by Academy Award nominee Amy Berg (Deliver Us from Evil, West of Memphis). The series will explore the 1999 disappearance and murder of 18-year-old Baltimore County high school student Hae Min Lee, and the subsequent conviction of her ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed. The case was brought to global attention by the hugely popular Serial podcast.

    In June 2016, Baltimore Circuit Court Judge Martin P. Welch vacated Adnan Syed’s conviction and granted him a new trial after new evidence challenged the reliability of cell phone data linking Syed to the crime scene, and a long-awaited alibi witness finally had her day in court. The State of Maryland appealed the lower court judge’s ruling, but on March 29, 2018, the Court of Special Appeals also ruled to vacate Syed’s conviction and granted him the retrial he has been waiting for.

    The Case Against Adnan Syed will offer a cinematic look at the life and 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee and conviction of Adnan Syed, from the genesis of their high school relationship, cultural conflict, the aftermath of her disappearance, to the original police investigation and trial, through to the current day, when Syed faces a new trial after serving 18 years in jail. With exclusive access to Adnan Syed, his family and his lawyers, director Amy Berg has been closely following their efforts to obtain justice, with the outcome still to be determined — and possibly shaped by the investigation pursued within the series itself.

    In production since 2015, the documentary series closely re-examines the events leading up to Hae Min Lee’s disappearance. Presenting new discoveries, as well as groundbreaking revelations that challenge the state’s case, and featuring exclusive access not only to Syed and those around him but to friends and teachers of Hae Min Lee and Syed, and members of City of Baltimore law enforcement, the series traces how the rush to justice and Syed’s conviction in 2000 raised more questions than answers about what happened to Hae Min Lee, underscoring the instability of memory and conflicting eyewitnesses.

    Working Title TV and Instinct Productions are producing and NBC Universal International Studios are distributing the follow-up to the case, which will debut on HBO in the U.S. and on Sky Atlantic in Europe. Henrietta Conrad and Jemima Khan will executive producer for Instinct Productions alongside Working Title TV’s Eric Fellner, Tim Bevan, and Andrew Stearn.
    Quote Originally Posted by Hunchback Jack View Post
    Most listeners, I think, want to know what actually happened to Hae.
    I agree and I hope this new series would address this much more and not just have her as an afterthought. What happened to Adnan, if he is innocent, is fucked up, but she was murdered.

  21. #21
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    Since we don't have a general podcast thread, I thought I'd recommend folks who liked Serial and S-Town check out In the Dark: https://www.apmreports.org/in-the-dark and Someone Knows Something: http://www.cbc.ca/radio/sks

  22. #22
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    Quote Originally Posted by Hunchback Jack View Post
    So it's a bit unsatidfying, over all.
    I've also been listening to the Truth & Justice podcast, which initially started as The Serial Dynasty podcast. Very interesting and intriguing investigations and interviews:

    https://audioboom.com/channel/the-serial-dynasty

    Just scroll to the very bottom. It's the first episodes of the show, from 101 to 132. Highly recommended.

  23. #23
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    https://mashable.com/article/serial-season-3/
    Get ready for a podcast to completely take over your life – again. Serial is back Sept. 20 for Season 3, with new episodes every Thursday.

    According to a press release from the Serial team, Season 1 was downloaded over 16 million times. The phenomenal popularity of Serial's 2014 debut was a key factor in the resurgence and rise of podcast culture. It also led, remarkably, to the revisiting of Adnan Syed's contentious murder conviction (though things are moving slow).

    In Season 3, Serial goes right into the nitty-gritty and often uncomfortable flaws of the criminal justice system, specifically in Cleveland. From drug possession to full-on felony, each episode or batch of episodes will focus on a different crime and how it goes through the system.

    “Every case Emmanuel [Dzotsi, a reporter] and I followed, there came a point where we thought: No, this can’t be how it works,” says host Sarah Koenig. “And then we were like, Oh! Oh my god. This is how it works! This is how it happens! People who work in the system, or have been through the system, they know this. But millions more people do not. And for the past year I’ve had this urgent feeling of wanting to kind of hold open the courthouse door, and wave people inside. Because things are happening – shocking things, fascinating things – in plain sight.”

    The first two episodes of Serial debut Sept. 20.

  24. #24
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  25. #25
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    Is there a release date set?
    Only the gentle are ever really strong.

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