12 ms·

Adnan Syed, of ‘Serial’ Podcast, Gets a Retrial in Murder Case

256 points by mcgwiz 10y ago

danso 10y ago
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 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.
- faide 10y ago
  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. :)
  - danso 10y ago
    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.
- thompo 10y ago
  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.
  - Falcon9 10y ago
    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.
- djb_hackernews 10y ago
  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.
  - berberous 10y ago
    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.
    - djb_hackernews 10y ago
      I believe he did it. Firmly. 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.
      - macspoofing 10y ago
        >I believe he did it. Firmly. 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.
- mountaineer 10y ago
  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.
- iamdave 10y ago
  >(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.
  - hammock 10y ago
    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.
  - Roodgorf 10y ago
    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".
    - iamdave 10y ago
      Ah gotcha. I sped my reading right through that operative.
- MOARDONGZPLZ 10y ago
  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.
  - baddox 10y ago
    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.
  - subpixel 10y ago
    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.
    - jonknee 10y ago
      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.
    - 7Z7 10y ago
      >As a listener, this meant I honestly felt like I had wasted a huge amount of time on the show. That seems like such a weird conclusion to me.
- nickysielicki 10y ago
  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.
- zwieback 10y ago
  There's a shrimp sale at the Crab Crib
- manish_gill 10y ago
  It's also been widely regarded by lawyers as a great popular case study on the concept of Reasonable Doubt. Source: Friend in Big Law
- dankohn1 10y ago
  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.
- alphonsegaston 10y ago
  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. See update at the bottom: http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/evidenceprof/2015/01/ive-posted-26-entriessarah-koenigsserial-podcast-which-deals-withthe-1999-prosecution-of-17-year-old-adnan-syed-for-murderin.html http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/evidenceprof/2015/01/ive-po...
  - cwills 10y ago
    Interesting. Following serial there was an interview with Jay by The Intercept where he talks about incosistencies in his story, and how lied about some details because he was drug dealing from his grandmothers house and he wanted to protect her from any fallout. https://theintercept.com/2014/12/29/exclusive-interview-jay-wilds-star-witness-adnan-syed-serial-case-pt-1/ https://theintercept.com/2014/12/29/exclusive-interview-jay-... https://theintercept.com/2014/12/30/exclusive-jay-part-2/ https://theintercept.com/2014/12/30/exclusive-jay-part-2/ 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. "
    - xenadu02 10y ago
      He does say that but it seems clear that if Adnan didn't kill her, Jay did so he has ever reason to lie. Just as Adnan does.
- firebones 10y ago
  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.
mazhar40 10y ago
Here is the Justin Brown's tweet
macspoofing 10y ago
The state won't retry. He's going to walk. Good for him. Who knows if he really did it or not, but the evidence against him was sketchy.
- jchendy 10y ago
  > The state won't retry. You say that like it's a fact. What's your evidence?
  - macspoofing 10y ago
    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?
    - kmonsen 10y ago
      Jay also seems like a coached witness, his value must be close to zero. And that means the whole investigation was a bit fishy.
  - mcbits 10y ago
    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.
    - AnkhMorporkian 10y ago
      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.
nkrisc 10y ago
If he actually didn't do it, then who did? I have to think we'll never know at this point.
- macspoofing 10y ago
  Undisclosed and 'Truth and Justice' podcasts came very close to pointing a finger at someone. The problem is that the original investigation was a sloppy and certain leads and discrepancies weren't followed up on.
- marksands07 10y ago
  Did you listen to the podcast? Jay ADMITTED to it. And he walked.
  - macspoofing 10y ago
    No he didn't.
  - nostromo 10y ago
    Jay only admitted to helping Syed bury the body.
    - marksands07 10y ago
      Ok my mistake. But he's the best lead anyone has at the very least.
  - nkrisc 10y ago
    Jay admitted to helping get rid of Hae's body, but as I recall from the podcast, that seemed to not hold water.
- jmcgough 10y ago
  imo he probably did it, but the evidence is spotty enough that I'm not sure if he should be convicted.
Hydraulix989 10y ago
redacted
- Others 10y ago
  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.
  - Hydraulix989 10y ago
    AHHHH I was confused, and thought that he wasn't originally convicted (maybe this exposes my own hypocrisy).
- themartorana 10y ago
  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.
  - Hydraulix989 10y ago
    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.
guelo 10y ago
I'm a bit at a loss as to why general entertainment pop culture news is interesting to hackers.
- jchendy 10y ago
  >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.
- meddlepal 10y ago
  Because not all of us are robots that only care about making our computers beep, boop and flash?
  - guelo 10y ago
    Geez people really hated my comment. But still, there's entertainment news everyday but normally it's not at the top of HN. Why this one?
- icodestuff 10y ago
  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.
- mayneack 10y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5321564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5321564
- bbayles 10y ago
  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.
geophile 10y ago
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.
- scott_s 10y ago
  > "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.
- Falcon9 10y ago
  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.
  - TwoBit 10y ago
    That hardly convinces me he is innocent. 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.
    - vincentkriek 10y ago
      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.
JoBrad 10y ago
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.
- shas3 10y ago
  That's why you have Marshall Project. https://www.themarshallproject.org/#.t1nzcmhDj https://www.themarshallproject.org/#.t1nzcmhDj 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.
- macspoofing 10y ago
  >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.
billiam 10y ago
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.
- Falcon9 10y ago
  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.
thomasthomas 10y ago
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?
- duskwuff 10y ago
  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.
  - JBReefer 10y ago
    No way. The validity of backwards looking data on every project I've ever worked on is sacrosanct.
    - pfranz 10y ago
      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.
      - TwoBit 10y ago
        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.
cleandreams 10y ago
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.
- obj-g 10y ago
  You'd rather maybe an innocent man stay there?
slackstation 10y ago
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.
- anf 10y ago
  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.
  - tptacek 10y ago
    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.
    - mattdeboard 10y ago
      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.
pyrrhotech 10y ago
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
- atdt 10y ago
  But he hasn't accepted responsibility. He continues to deny his involvement. And it's the rest of the world that did him wrong.
  - bmmayer1 10y ago
    Unless the rest of the world did do him wrong, and he wasn't involved. Then it would be an outrage for him to have spent any time in prison.

256 points by mcgwiz 10y ago

danso 10y ago

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 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.

faide 10y ago
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. :)
- danso 10y ago
  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.
thompo 10y ago
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.
- Falcon9 10y ago
  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.
djb_hackernews 10y ago
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.
- berberous 10y ago
  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.
  - djb_hackernews 10y ago
    I believe he did it. Firmly. 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.
    - macspoofing 10y ago
      >I believe he did it. Firmly. 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.
mountaineer 10y ago
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.
iamdave 10y ago
>(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.
- hammock 10y ago
  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.
- Roodgorf 10y ago
  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".
  - iamdave 10y ago
    Ah gotcha. I sped my reading right through that operative.
MOARDONGZPLZ 10y ago
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.
- baddox 10y ago
  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.
- subpixel 10y ago
  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.
  - jonknee 10y ago
    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.
  - 7Z7 10y ago
    >As a listener, this meant I honestly felt like I had wasted a huge amount of time on the show. That seems like such a weird conclusion to me.
nickysielicki 10y ago
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.
zwieback 10y ago
There's a shrimp sale at the Crab Crib
manish_gill 10y ago
It's also been widely regarded by lawyers as a great popular case study on the concept of Reasonable Doubt. Source: Friend in Big Law
dankohn1 10y ago
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.
alphonsegaston 10y ago
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. See update at the bottom: http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/evidenceprof/2015/01/ive-posted-26-entriessarah-koenigsserial-podcast-which-deals-withthe-1999-prosecution-of-17-year-old-adnan-syed-for-murderin.html http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/evidenceprof/2015/01/ive-po...
- cwills 10y ago
  Interesting. Following serial there was an interview with Jay by The Intercept where he talks about incosistencies in his story, and how lied about some details because he was drug dealing from his grandmothers house and he wanted to protect her from any fallout. https://theintercept.com/2014/12/29/exclusive-interview-jay-wilds-star-witness-adnan-syed-serial-case-pt-1/ https://theintercept.com/2014/12/29/exclusive-interview-jay-... https://theintercept.com/2014/12/30/exclusive-jay-part-2/ https://theintercept.com/2014/12/30/exclusive-jay-part-2/ 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. "
  - xenadu02 10y ago
    He does say that but it seems clear that if Adnan didn't kill her, Jay did so he has ever reason to lie. Just as Adnan does.
firebones 10y ago
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.

mazhar40 10y ago

Here is the Justin Brown's tweet

macspoofing 10y ago

The state won't retry. He's going to walk. Good for him. Who knows if he really did it or not, but the evidence against him was sketchy.

jchendy 10y ago
> The state won't retry. You say that like it's a fact. What's your evidence?
- macspoofing 10y ago
  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?
  - kmonsen 10y ago
    Jay also seems like a coached witness, his value must be close to zero. And that means the whole investigation was a bit fishy.
- mcbits 10y ago
  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.
  - AnkhMorporkian 10y ago
    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.

nkrisc 10y ago

If he actually didn't do it, then who did? I have to think we'll never know at this point.

macspoofing 10y ago
Undisclosed and 'Truth and Justice' podcasts came very close to pointing a finger at someone. The problem is that the original investigation was a sloppy and certain leads and discrepancies weren't followed up on.
marksands07 10y ago
Did you listen to the podcast? Jay ADMITTED to it. And he walked.
- macspoofing 10y ago
  No he didn't.
- nostromo 10y ago
  Jay only admitted to helping Syed bury the body.
  - marksands07 10y ago
    Ok my mistake. But he's the best lead anyone has at the very least.
- nkrisc 10y ago
  Jay admitted to helping get rid of Hae's body, but as I recall from the podcast, that seemed to not hold water.
jmcgough 10y ago
imo he probably did it, but the evidence is spotty enough that I'm not sure if he should be convicted.

Hydraulix989 10y ago

redacted

Others 10y ago
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.
- Hydraulix989 10y ago
  AHHHH I was confused, and thought that he wasn't originally convicted (maybe this exposes my own hypocrisy).
themartorana 10y ago
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.
- Hydraulix989 10y ago
  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.

guelo 10y ago

I'm a bit at a loss as to why general entertainment pop culture news is interesting to hackers.

jchendy 10y ago
>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.
meddlepal 10y ago
Because not all of us are robots that only care about making our computers beep, boop and flash?
- guelo 10y ago
  Geez people really hated my comment. But still, there's entertainment news everyday but normally it's not at the top of HN. Why this one?
icodestuff 10y ago
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.
mayneack 10y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5321564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5321564
bbayles 10y ago
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.

geophile 10y ago

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.

scott_s 10y ago
> "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.
Falcon9 10y ago
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.
- TwoBit 10y ago
  That hardly convinces me he is innocent. 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.
  - vincentkriek 10y ago
    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.

JoBrad 10y ago

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.

shas3 10y ago
That's why you have Marshall Project. https://www.themarshallproject.org/#.t1nzcmhDj https://www.themarshallproject.org/#.t1nzcmhDj 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.
macspoofing 10y ago
>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.

billiam 10y ago

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.

Falcon9 10y ago
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.

thomasthomas 10y ago

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?

duskwuff 10y ago
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.
- JBReefer 10y ago
  No way. The validity of backwards looking data on every project I've ever worked on is sacrosanct.
  - pfranz 10y ago
    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.
    - TwoBit 10y ago
      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.

cleandreams 10y ago

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.

obj-g 10y ago
You'd rather maybe an innocent man stay there?

slackstation 10y ago

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.

anf 10y ago
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.
- tptacek 10y ago
  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.
  - mattdeboard 10y ago
    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.

pyrrhotech 10y ago

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

atdt 10y ago
But he hasn't accepted responsibility. He continues to deny his involvement. And it's the rest of the world that did him wrong.
- bmmayer1 10y ago
  Unless the rest of the world did do him wrong, and he wasn't involved. Then it would be an outrage for him to have spent any time in prison.