12/8/2023 0 Comments Serial podcastYears from now, if someone were to revisit or discover Syed’s story, they would find a remarkable tale of a completely typical failure in the justice system that starts and ends in one place. Pending further unexpected turns, Tuesday’s brief update, then, functions as a kind of bookend within the context of the Serial podcast feed as a stand-alone historical document. Many of these surprises had already been culturally processed and ingested through an expanded cluster of media that popped up to take over Syed’s story when the Serial team moved on, including, and perhaps most prominently, the Undisclosed podcast, co-hosted by Syed’s friend and longtime advocate Rabia Chaudry (who first brought the case to Koenig) and Amy Berg’s 2019 HBO docuseries, The Case Against Adnan Syed. That development itself followed another well-documented tangle of twists and turns within the story: Syed’s conviction had previously been vacated by an appeals court in 2018, only for the state’s highest court to reverse that decision a year later. Their request was based on new evidence uncovered in an investigation that began after Maryland adopted a law allowing individuals convicted of crimes as a juvenile to have their sentences modified after serving 20 years. The shock of this twist had already played out in the broader media ecosystem through the torrent of headlines that burst out last week, when news first broke that prosecutors had filed a motion asking a judge to overturn Syed’s 2000 conviction in the murder of Hae Min Lee, who had been his ex-girlfriend. For those broadly following the story (which is to say a lot of people), Tuesday’s update contained nothing particularly new or wild. The rest of the episode covered the series of events that led to this decision. From the sounds captured in the field recording, filled with cheers and tears and raw emotion, the scene did, indeed, feel extraordinary. “It was extraordinary, the whole thing.” She walked listeners through the scene on Monday afternoon at the Baltimore City Circuit Court, where the press conference - publicizing that a judge had vacated Syed’s life sentence - was held. “Adnan Syed got out of prison yesterday,” said host Sarah Koenig in the first seconds of the episode, her familiar narration sounding almost matter-of-fact. On Tuesday, the morning after Adnan Syed walked free following more than two decades behind bars, the Serial team, which first vaulted Syed’s story to international attention, released a brisk 17-minute update documenting the remarkable moment. Photo-Illustration: Vulture Photo by Jerry Jackson/The Baltimore Sun/Tribune News Service via Getty ImagesĪ prerecorded Global Tel Link notice, Nick Thorburn’s plinking theme song, the drop in the beat - it’s almost Pavlovian how Serial’s opening sequence can take you back nearly eight years.
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