I'm only a few months late to the game on this one! I love listening to podcasts, but I'm actually not a huge fan of This American Life, so I was reluctant to start on this particular podcast. But I caught up on my podcasts over the Christmas and New Year's breaks, so I decided to try Serial out. This lead to binge-listening to as much of the podcast as I could at a time, and I finished the whole thing within about a week.
In case you were unaware, Serial is a weekly podcast that told the real-life story of a murder case. In 1999, Adnan Syed was accused of killing his girlfriend Hae Min Lee. The case went to trial and he was found guilty, and is currently serving a life sentence. The question the podcast posits is: did he really do it?
Like most listeners, I waffled between being sure he did, and then completely unsure. Just like host Sarah Koenig, I still don't know, even after the season is over. I won't waste any time here discussing it, as it's been discussed ad nauseum in many elsewheres on the internet. Here are a few post-podcast articles I found interesting:
- Pivotal witness Jay talks about his side of the story that he didn't give on the podcast.
- The prosecuter who declined to be interviewed finally speaks out.
- Here's a whole subreddit on Reddit dedicated to further dissecting the story.
The podcast really shows how incredibly hard it is to ever really know the truth about something, to ever have all the accurate facts. You can't know if one person is telling the truth, or lying, or even partially lying. Everything can have an effect on the outcome of a case: the inability to produce a reliable alibi, a key witness misremembering an important fact, a lawyer having a private issue/breakdown, a bystander not coming forward in time. So many things that could have been pivotal, that could have changed the outcome of the case.
I can't wait for next season of Serial, and to see what new case they will examine next.
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