"Baltimore’s top prosecutor is no longer seeking to vacate the murder conviction of Adnan Syed, the man whose case garnered national attention in the 'Serial' podcast..."

"...over a decade ago. In a new filing Tuesday evening, Baltimore City State’s Attorney Ivan Bates withdrew a motion to vacate Syed’s conviction filed in 2022 by previous state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby, saying the original motion contains 'false and misleading statements.'... Syed was convicted in 2000 for the 1999 murder of his then-high school classmate and ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee... Last August, the Maryland Supreme Court upheld a lower appellate court’s decision to reinstate Syed’s conviction, ruling that the rights of Lee’s family were violated because her official representative, her brother Young Lee, was not properly notified of the 2022 hearing to vacate the conviction...."

From "Baltimore prosecutors give up fight to vacate Adnan Syed’s murder conviction ahead of hearing to reduce his prison sentence" (CNN).

"A Maryland appeals court on Tuesday reinstated the murder conviction of Adnan Syed, the subject of the 'Serial' podcast who was freed last year..."

"... after he had spent 23 years fighting charges that he had killed his former high school girlfriend. The Appellate Court of Maryland ruled that a lower court had violated the right of Young Lee, brother of Hae Min Lee, the victim, to have been notified of and to attend a hearing on the state’s motion to vacate Mr. Syed’s conviction. The appeals court ordered a new hearing on the state’s motion to vacate Mr. Syed’s conviction. The court wrote that it 'has the power and obligation to remedy those violations, as long we can do so without violating Mr. Syed’s right to be free from double jeopardy.' 'We can do that, and accordingly, we vacate the circuit court’s order vacating Mr. Syed’s convictions, which results in the reinstatement of the original convictions and sentence.... We remand for a new, legally compliant, and transparent hearing on the motion to vacate, where Mr. Lee is given notice of the hearing that is sufficient to allow him to attend in person, evidence supporting the motion to vacate is presented, and the court states its reasons in support of its decision."

The NYT reports.

I presume Syed will remain free, Lee will be given a respectful hearing, and the result will remain the same.

"Hiring Mr. Syed at this point is, at best, premature and I am deeply concerned that Georgetown is placing the value of celebrity over the Jesuit values that made the school what it is today."

Said Steve Kelly, lawyer for the family of the murdered teenager Hae Min Lee, quoted in "Georgetown hires Adnan Syed after court tossed his murder conviction/Prosecutors have acknowledged Syed, subject of the true-crime ‘Serial’ podcast, was wrongly convicted" (WaPo).

Kelly said in a statement that he applauded Syed’s efforts to improve himself by getting a degree, but as a Georgetown graduate himself he was also “appalled that Mr. Syed has been deemed an ‘exoneree’ based on a deeply flawed process in which his victim’s family had no voice and at which no evidence of actual innocence was presented.”

Adnan Syed goes free — charges dropped.

Breaking News: Baltimore prosecutors dropped charges against Adnan Syed, who spent 23 years in prison fighting a murder conviction on charges that he murdered his former high school girlfriend Hae Min Lee. His case was chronicled on the podcast “Serial.” https://t.co/8C3MRH9nSm

— The New York Times (@nytimes) October 11, 2022

"Prosecutors in Baltimore are asking a judge to vacate Adnan Syed’s conviction for the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee, a case that riveted America..."

"... when it was turned into the hit first season of the podcast 'Serial.' The state’s attorney for Baltimore City said in a motion filed Wednesday in circuit court that a nearly yearlong investigation, conducted with the defense, found new evidence, including information concerning the possible involvement of two alternative suspects. Prosecutors are requesting Mr. Syed be given a new trial. They said they weren’t asserting that Mr. Syed is innocent. 'However, for all the reasons set forth below, the State no longer has confidence in the integrity of the conviction,' said the office of Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby, which is overseeing the reinvestigation. The office is recommending Mr. Syed be released on his own recognizance pending the continuing investigation...."

The Wall Street Journal reports.

Top comment over there: "This is the same Marylin Mosby that indicted several Baltimore cops for murder and failed to get a conviction. The same person who was caught cheating on taxes or a mortgage application. Now she wants to release a convicted murderer while their retrial takes place and no definitive suspect has been identified...."

"Other podcasts, billed as 'true-crime comedy,' offer up a homeopathic remedy: steep yourself in murder, and the murderers can’t get you."

"This weird logic is openly acknowledged in the first episode of My Favorite Murder, the Gen-X and Millennial answer to True Detective. With hosts Karen Kilgariff, a stand-up comedian, and Georgia Hardstark, a cooking show personality, it launched in 2016 with the women saying, 'Let’s get cozy and comfy and…talk about murder!' Girlfriends huddling around a campfire sharing scary stories, they take violence to be inevitable. 'Tell me everything so I can avoid it!' says Hardstark in that first episode. Kilgariff replies, 'I just want to collect information and hear theories and stories so I can be braced, so that…I’m ready.' She goes on: 'It’s the law of physics…the more you know about something, the less likely it will happen to you.' That’s more fantasy than physics, but this program too has been downloaded millions of times. The hosts’ motto and title of their 2019 joint memoir is Stay Sexy and Don’t Get Murdered. It’s a joke, but it’s not a joke."

That's an isolated snippet of "Murder Is My Business/In the true crime genre’s latest iteration, writers, reporters, bloggers, documentary filmmakers, and podcast hosts have taken a soiled brand and turned it into a collective exercise in retributive justice, recording and correcting the history of sexual violence" by Caroline Fraser (NY Review of Books). 

Lots more in that article, including a recommendation of the book "True Crime Detective Magazines 1924–1969."

Here's the website for "My Favorite Murder."

I've mostly stayed away from the true-crime genre myself. I listened to "Serial" but ultimately disapproved of it. I listened to "Dirty John" around the same time. But I've avoided all that since then. I don't want those things in my head. I don't even want to watch movies with murders anymore. There's something very strange about the way we humans entertain ourselves with murder, and I am not buying the homeopathy theory!

"Adnan Syed, subject of 'Serial' podcast, will not get a new trial."

CNN reports.

The [Maryland] Court of Appeals reinstated the conviction by reversing a March 2018 ruling by the Maryland Court of Special Appeals. That court had ordered a new trial for Syed, who is serving a life sentence in the slaying of his ex-girlfriend. Adnan had argued that he had ineffective counsel because his former defense lawyer didn't interview an alibi witness.

But in a ruling released Friday, the Maryland Court of Appeals said that because of "the totality of the evidence" against Syed, there was not "a significant or substantial possibility that the jury would have reached a different verdict had his trial counsel presented the alibi witness."... 

"Adnan Syed of ‘Serial’ Is Granted a New Trial."

The NYT reports.

In the ruling, the Maryland Court of Special Appeals said he had received ineffective legal counsel at his trial because his original lawyer had failed to call a witness whose testimony, if believed, “would have made it impossible for Syed to have murdered Hae.”

Is that really the standard for ineffective legal counsel that will be applied for people who don't have elaborate podcasts creating the sense that something is terribly amiss?

I'm listening to the new podcast "S-Town."

All 7 episodes of "S-Town" (AKA "Shit Town") became available at once — here —  and that makes it difficult to have a discussion. It's not like "Serial," where you'd get one episode a week and could bandy about all your theories and opinions while waiting for the next episode to come out.

I'm in the middle of episode 4 right now, so I'm not sure who I can talk to. I don't want spoilers. I had a good discussion yesterday with someone who was ahead of me in the episodes but being very careful not to say anything revealing, even to react one way or another to my ideas about what I thought would happen. He stressed that I shouldn't read anything about it, and I was all I know, I won't.

But it does make me feel that I need to rush through, so the experience is not spoiled, so I get the artful roll-out of the story as it was intended. I think I'd prefer to get it week by week and to have an opportunity to discuss one episode at a time — as I mostly did with "Serial."

Now, part of what I find myself thinking about is why they chose to dump the whole thing at once, and that's coloring my experience of it. Perhaps they wanted to control the storytelling, and if they restricted the flow, key information would come out in news and social media anyway. The story would be told in any crude, blunt way that anybody who could scoop them chose.

But I'm also thinking that the whole enterprise is exploitative of real people, and episode-by-episode discussion in social media might have questioned the ethics and got some serious antagonism going against the show. Dropping the whole thing at once gets ahead of that phenomenon.

I'll have more to say about exploitation and ethics when I'm finished with the whole show. It's quite interesting and elegantly crafted. The aural art is equal to the visual art which you can see at the link. You might want to get going listening to this thing so you'll be in a position to talk about it with me when I'm ready, which will be soon. Until then, I'm not reading any articles, and I won't be reading the comments to this thread — so go ahead and say anything you like.

UPDATE: Since finishing the post, I've made it to the end, beyond spoiling. Quite an amazing work of art.

"Conviction vacated, new trial granted for Adnan Syed of 'Serial.'"

"The court finds that trial counsel's performance fell below the standard of reasonable professional judgment when she failed to cross-examine the state's cell tower expert regarding a disclaimer obtained as part of pre-trial discovery," wrote retired Judge Martin Welch.

MORE: Here, in the NYT:

In February, Mr. Syed’s defense challenged the testimony of an AT&T engineer whose sworn statements on cellphone data were used to link Mr. Syed to the park where Ms. Lee’s body was buried. The engineer, Abraham Waranowitz, said he was not shown a crucial disclaimer about cell tower data that would have affected his testimony in the murder trial.

But much of the defense team’s argument for a retrial centered on the testimony of Asia McClain, an alibi witness who also figured prominently in “Serial.”

About those 5 teenage boys who confronted a father and daughter at gunpoint in a Brooklyn playground, and ordered the man to go so they could rape the 18-year-old woman...

Remember we talked about it here on January 11th? Two of them were turned in by their own mothers. The police were criticized for not acting sooner.

Now, the charges are all being dropped, WaPo reports:

The woman and her father had provided inconsistent and unreliable stories, said Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson. Snippets of cellphone videos suggested the sex was consensual, prosecutors said. Worst of all, the father himself had been “engaging in sexual conduct” with his own daughter when the incident began, Thompson said....

To some critics, the bizarre, lurid case and rush to judgment recalled in some respects another controversial New York City rape case. In 1989, a woman was brutally raped while jogging through Central Park.... The five teens were convicted of a slew of charges [and later] exonerated....

In the comments to the January 11th blog post, MisterBuddwing had said:

I wouldn't be the least surprised if things happened exactly the way the police said they did. In which case, let the perps rot. But perhaps we should remember the case of the Central Park jogger. Five youths - four black, one Hispanic - were arrested in that rape-assault, and leading the charge, screaming for their blood, was a real estate mogul named Donald Trump. Years later, their convictions were vacated...

Oh! Donald Trump! Fancy meeting him here. The Washington Post drags him into this too:

Donald Trump took out a full-page ad in four New York newspapers with the title: “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!”

There's an image of the ad, but it's not enlargeable, so I can't read past the quoted headline. Here's an image big enough to read the text. Let's be clear: Somebody attacked the Central Park jogger. People were terrorized by violence in the city back then and could not walk in Central Park after dark. Women in particular were limited in our movement through the city. Trump wrote: "How can our great society tolerate the continued brutalization of its citizens by crazed misfits? Criminals must be told that their CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS... Let our politicians give back our police department's power to keep us safe. Unshackle them from the constant chant of 'police brutality'.... We must cease our continuous pandering to the criminal population of this city."

There's a lot of resonance with themes in the current election, but there's no focus on the problem of catching the wrong people. There definitely was and is violence from which we expect our leaders to protect us. That involves finding the real perpetrators of genuine acts of violence.

In this new case, it's not a question of finding the right people but of ascertaining whether the actions in question are really a crime. Much of our focus lately — with Season 1 of "Serial" and "The Making a Murderer" and much of The Innocence Project — has been on absolutely real and serious crimes and the problem of pinning those crimes on the wrong man. It's quite another matter when you have the person you know did something, but the question is whether it's a crime, as in this Brooklyn playground rape/nonrape (and also the new season of "Serial," looking into the case of Bowe Bergdahl).

By the way, if the Brooklyn playground sex was consensual and the woman was 18 and one of the boys was 14, hasn't the woman committed second degree rape under New York criminal law? Back to the WaPo article:

[T]he teens told police they had encountered the father and daughter having sex in the park that night. The teenagers then joined in the act. “She said yeah,” a man’s voice can be heard saying on the video, according to the Times. “If you said yeah, it’s lit, like, you know what I mean,” a man then says on the video. “I could tell you a freak.” Confronted by police, the father and daughter reversed course, admitting that there was no gun. The woman admitted that she had consented to the group sex. The father and daughter also both eventually admitted to drinking alcohol and having sex with one another, according to the Times....

“I think [there] is a way, from a policy and social standpoint, to say, ‘Young men should exercise a little bit better judgment in dealing with certain things,’ but what they did didn’t rise to criminality,” attorney Ken Montgomery told the Times. “I would agree, in a sense, that we live in a country and a world where we have a lot of unhealthy ideas of what appropriate sexual relationships are.”

Incredibly sad and debased. I don't know where I would start dealing with a situation that has reached such a low place. It's easy to say the government should back off and do nothing. Maybe Trump has some ideas.

With the focus off the five boys, it shifted to the father and his daughter, who prosecutors have stressed is still a victim, even if she consented to the sex.

Why, exactly, does she get to be the victim?

How she came to have sex with her own father, unleashing a torrid and tragic series of events, is, in part, a story of the failings of the American foster-care system.....

Do the Taliban listen to "Serial" and do they like it? Yes!

Stephen Colbert interviews Sarah Koenig about the second season of "Serial," which examines the case of Bowe Bergdahl.

Trouble in "Serial" land?

The prodigious podcast is suddenly switching to every other week — apparently so they can absorb all the criticism, do more research, procure more interviews, and tweak the script in the story of Bowe Bergdahl:

“There are more paths we need to go down,” [said executive producer Julie Snyder.] “Since we started broadcasting the show, we have gotten more people willing to talk, and because of that, it has opened up more avenues of reporting.” She declined to comment on whom those interviews were with, or what additional reporting the show needed to pursue. “We have narrative developments,” she said. “I hesitate on calling them news developments.”

There's also the fact that the show is not doing as well as the last season, the one about an imprisoned man and a murder we'd never heard of. Shifting to Bergdahl is telling us about somebody we already knew and had already, perhaps, processed into a kind of oblivion. Did we really want to pull him back into our attention and, week by week, hour by hour, take some differing complicated perspectives on him?

The characters in both seasons are mysterious men. We can wonder who is this guy? But in season 1, there was the solidity of knowing a young woman really was murdered and a young man really was suffering the punishment, and the mystery was whether he's the murderer. In season 2, we know the external reality of what the man did. That part is solid. The mystery lies in why he did it and what it meant to him. He's not been punished yet (though we might decide his suffering in captivity was punishment enough, so let's leave him alone). It lies in the future, what the legal process will give him. His mental state will play some part in that determination. But we'll see that unfold in the news as his trial proceeds.

Why would we want the alternative viewings of the mind of Bergdahl as managed and manipulated by the "Serial" crowd? I think the answer should be: Because there's a fascinating, delicate art to the the "Serial" presentation. But when art is about real-life facts subject to dispute, especially about current events, there's a lot of static between you and the artist. It can make you want to turn the dial to another channel.

ADDED: Saying that about art made me think about this, a quote from David Bowie that I'd read earlier this morning on Facebook. You can see that I commented over there, linking to the comments section of an old post of mine in which my ex-husband quoted Oscar Wilde: "Views are held by those who are not artists." That old post, by the way, links to 2 other posts, one of which quotes me quoting myself in my own comments section — recursive enough for you? — saying something about Bob Dylan that caused an uproar back in 2005: "To be a great artist is inherently right wing...." Lots of my current husband in the comments there, 4 years before I met him, talking about Bob Dylan, saying things like: "I thought Ann's quote was very smart - nearly brilliant" and "Seriously, with her aversion to politics and her ability to tweak the self-satisfaction and dogmatism of diverse groups, don't you agree that AA just might be the '66 Dylan of this new blogging medium, albeit sober? She is clearly an inspired artist hitting her stride."

"Koenig hypnotically weaves together the accounts of a trusted journalist and her own source inside the Taliban."

"The picture that emerges is a sort of counterweight to Bergdahl’s self-spun capture story: He was found inside or near a nomad tent. Nomads informed the Taliban that a foreigner was in the area. When the Taliban arrived to check it out, they told Bergdahl that they were the police, and he immediately jumped behind their motorcycles, as if seeking protection from them. They called Bergdahl a 'ready-made loaf,' a gift that had fallen into their hands without their having to work for it. Bergdahl fought a little at first, but he was pretty easily subdued. Here we hit our first real point of departure from Bergdahl’s own story. Our first muddying of the narrative...."

"Bowe Bergdahl said he planned to cause a DUSTWUN by leaving his outpost, OP Mest, and running—or at least walking—to his base, FOB Sharana."

"This map (push play to fly over the area) gives a sense of the terrain he would have had to cross."

That's a supplement to the first episode of the new season of Serial, which I've listened to. It's mostly Berghdahl's side of the story — we hear his explanation of what he was supposedly doing — and I didn't believe him. You can listen to the episode here. There's a question at 40:43 that gets a long pause and a "Pretty much." That's when I said out loud: "He's lying."

Anyway, that map makes his story even more absurd.

But then, I listened to the first season of Serial and thought it was easy to hear that the central character was lying, and yet people became intensely involved and got very connected to that person. There's something about the style of the presentation that draws people in and seems to make them want to believe. Unless you believe, why are you listening? Put another way: If you want to listen, you need to suspend disbelief. The art of Serial is that it makes you want to listen.

The podcast "Serial" begins Season 2 this morning — the story of Bowe Bergdahl...

"... the U.S. soldier who walked off his post in Afghanistan in 2009 and was captured and held by the Taliban for nearly five years...."

This story—it spins out in so many unexpected directions. Because, yes, it’s about Bowe Bergdahl and about one strange decision he made, to leave his post. (And Bergdahl, by the way, is such an interesting and unusual guy, not like anyone I’ve encountered before.) But it’s also about all of the people affected by that decision, and the choices they made. Unlike our story in Season One, this one extends far out into the world. It reaches into swaths of the military, the peace talks to end the war, attempts to rescue other hostages, our Guantanamo policy. What Bergdahl did made me wrestle with things I’d thought I more or less understood, but really didn’t: what it means to be loyal, to be resilient, to be used, to be punished....

I haven't listened yet, but I surely will.

"Judge reopens ‘Serial’ case, allowing Adnan Syed to introduce new evidence."

WaPo reports.

Now, the court will consider a 2015 affidavit from Syed’s alibi witness, Asia McClain, in which she said she remembered talking with Syed in the library at the time prosecutors said the then-teenager killed his former girlfriend, Hae Min Lee. McClain said she reached out to Syed about helping with his defense, but his former lawyer never contacted her....

The court will also take up the reliability of cellphone evidence that helped the state place Syed at one of the scenes of the crime. Welch wrote that the court will also take up Syed’s former attorney’s “alleged failure to cross-examine” the state’s cellphone expert and “potential prosecutorial misconduct during trial.” In a sworn affidavit submitted last month, former AT&T engineer Abraham Waranowitz said he wasn’t given a disclaimer about the reliability of such data that he considered “critical” and “would have affected my testimony.”

And "Serial" has its season 2 subject matter: Bowe Bergdahl.

Rolling Stone reports.

Which statement comes closest to your reaction to the news of the second season of Serial?

I don't know (or don't care) what Serial is.

Another complicated is-he-guilty case. Serial should do a great job.

Ugh. Bergdahl. Hate to think of all the sympathy that Serial will stir up for him.

Might be interesting. I'll check it out.

 

pollcode.com free polls

"'What the hell did I do?' Mr. Durst whispers to himself in an unguarded moment caught on a microphone he wore during filming."

I'll put the rest after the fold in case you haven't watched the final episode of HBO's 6-part documentary "The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst."

"The Intercept media executives and staff weren’t fans of their own reporting on the case featured in the wildly popular podcast Serial, delaying stories because they were 'siding with The Man'..."

"... former Intercept senior investigative reporter Ken Silverstein wrote in POLITICO Magazine."

“I came to realize that the system working correctly—and the right people going to jail—isn’t a good narrative to tell at The Intercept,” Silverstein wrote.

From Silverstein's piece:

Publishing the Serial stories was a huge headache: There were constant delays and frustrations getting them out, even after it became clear they were drawing huge traffic. Our internal critics believed that Natasha and I had taken the side of the prosecutors—and hence the state. That support was unacceptable at a publication that claimed it was entirely independent and would be relentlessly adversarial towards The Man. That held true even in this case, when The Man successfully prosecuted a killer and sent him to jail.

Some colleagues, like Jeremy Scahill, were upset after the first installment of Natasha’s interviews with Jay, the state’s flawed-but-convincing key witness, and our co-bylined two-part interview with the lead prosecutor, Kevin Urick, both of whom had refused to speak to Sarah Koenig for her Serial podcast. Jeremy even threatened to quit over the second installment, according to two of my colleagues who witnessed what they described as his “temper tantrum” in the New York office. He told them he couldn’t believe that we’d so uncritically accepted the state’s view of the murder—even though our stories were backed up by our own research, our unique reporting and our reading of court documents. One day at the office, frustrated, Natasha wrote “Team Adnan” on a sign on Jeremy’s office door.