New documentary about Adnan Syed from the "Serial" podcast

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/02/06/new-documentary-about-adnan-sy.html

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The documentary, directed by Academy Award nominee Amy Berg, promises “a piece of evidence that nobody even realized existed for all these years.”

I presume that this evidence has been forwarded to the courts, and that they aren’t going to have to wait for the documentary to come out?

“Don’t fret, Syed, you’ve got a stay of execution until after the mid-season break.”

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Very off topic, but the second season of Serial, the Bo Lundberg one, was rubbish wasn’t it?

EDIT: Bowe Bergdahl… who cares, Swedes are all the same innit?

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Assuming they’re referring to the cover sheet for the AT&T cell tower data that was withheld by the prosecution because it says “this is not reliable data,” yes, it was an important part of securing a retrial.

Bowe Bergdahl. But yes, Undisclosed is the podcast people should be listening to instead.

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Is Undisclosed a separate
stand alone podcast,.
or part of Serial?
I’m waaaay behind,
haven’t listened to Part 1
Yet!

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It will be interesting to see how the TV medium affects people’s arbitrary guesses about his guilt. On the podcast, you could tell he was a Muslim, but on TV it will also be apparent that he was hot, which adds a whole new dimension to the debate.

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It’s a separate podcast. It started as an unofficial spin-off from the first season of Serial because they wanted to cover things that were either overlooked or omitted for whatever reason, but they’ve gone on to cover ten or so other cases.

It’s run by actual lawyers who’re investigating, so while the production quality isn’t as good as Serial, it’s much more thorough and puts an emphasis on the evidence rather than telling a good story.

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I don’t know whether or not he’s guilty and wouldn’t hazard a guess, but in addition to the common practice of prosecutors withholding potentially exculpatory evidence (for which prosecutors should at a minimum face disbarment but barely get a slap on the wrist), Syed’s private defense counsel Gutierrez sounds like she was a real piece of work. Not to speak ill of the dead, but between prosecutorial shenanigans and her own failure to give adequate representation, I don’t see how he got a fair trial either time.

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I know you’re joking but I want to point out for those following along at home that the MD Governor Martin O’Malley and state legislature passed a law on May 2, 2013 banning the death penalty. A big reason for this change was the story of Kirk Bloodsworth, a MD waterman, who was wrongfully accused of rape and murder and sentenced to death (later “only” life in prison). He was exonerated by then new DNA testing.

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I think she was a decent attorney when she was well, but she was battling cancer and also trying to practice law at the same time. I don’t think she was doing anywhere near her best work. What is unclear to me is if she knew, but needed the money badly enough that she was willing to do substandard work, or if she was so preoccupied with her own mortality that she didn’t realize how far she had slipped.

Or maybe I’m reading too much drama into the narrative.

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Not sure, but hard to believe someone with that many client complaints should’ve been practicing law as long as she did before her disbarment. Maybe it wasn’t all her fault, but someone dropped the ball there.

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Yeah, ok, fair.

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Well. Didn’t The Jinx on HBO get in trouble for airing the evidence before turning it over?

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I actually liked it a lot, and while flawed I think it was less icky than season one. Season two certainly had it’s flaws but it was trying to tackle a huge and complex story that isn’t as directly compelling but fascinating. My theory is that a bunch of people showed up expecting Forensic Files and found a ProPublica piece instead.

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Yup, tried and failed IMO.
It was made all the worse by the reporter’s dogged insistence that with every new bit of info in the Bergdahl saga, we were also getting a clearer picture of the overall situation in Afghanistan. This premise started to become ridiculous after a few episodes, Berghdahl’s deluded egotrip added nothing of value for anyone who’d arrive at the podcast with more interest in the country of Afghanistan than the minutiae of US military routine.

So he’s going to sit in jail while the filmmakers sit for months on evidence that could benefit him, until they have an opportunity to leverage this teased ‘asset’?

Man I’d definitely like to spend some of my remaining human hours adding to the 8 or so I’ve already spent not knowing wtf was going on with this case.

avoid netflix’s “making a murderer” at all costs then. while good, it can only really watched on fast forward. they took what could have been a great two or three hour story in two seasons of ten, hour long episodes.

:crying_cat_face:

I tried it and couldn’t do it. Excuse the obscenity but jacking off about other people’s suffering is getting a little old. The Netflix thing about the pedophile priest in Baltimore was truly awful. Fascinating though. At least it had some elements of social change and the victim was involved.

I lived in Baltimore and worked in Emergency Medicine there (which was crazeeeee). The Wire was much better prep for that than serial. Although many of my coworkers, black and white, were obsessed with it.

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Father Jeff? What’s the doc? I used to live down the street from a school that had a big problem with this. in Baltimore.