Serial and American Justice

In 2014, a former crime reporter narrated a story about a murder in suburban Baltimore and the subsequent trial and conviction of the murderer. It was released in weekly installments as a podcast called Serial, a spin-off from the NPR show, This American Life.  The reporter, Sarah Koenig, and one of her co-producers, Julie Snyder, created a very entertaining and interesting tale that invited the listener to decide whether the defendant, a teenager named Adnan Syed, was either guilty or not guilty.

Since Serial told the story, the true-life murder conviction of Syed was appealed and his conviction was upheld.  He served 23 years of a life sentence for killing his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee.

Serial was wildly popular, and attracted at lot of attention.  A number of high-profile popular media stories, including an HBO documentary, dealt with both the phenomena of Serial in popular culture, as well as the flaws and shortcomings of the police investigation and Syed’s trial.  Most of the focus of these efforts was to attack the prosecution’s case and to create doubt about Syed’s guilt.

Under a new Maryland law, Syed asked to have his sentence reduced and to be freed.  As a result of that process, but using a different rationale, the outgoing – and controversial – state’s attorney in Baltimore, Marilyn Mosby (herself under federal indictment) convinced a court to vacate the original conviction and free Syed.  She recently announced that she would not retry Syed.

I’ve leaned towards Syed being guilty since listening to Serial years ago when it first dropped. I have not followed closely all the subsequent media over the years since, but nothing I’ve seen or heard lately has changed my opinion.

But, here are a few observations about human nature and the way our criminal justice system is constructed:

• We’re studying the Bible’s first murder just now in a class at church. I was struck by how little it took for Cain to murder Abel. They each offered seemingly appropriate sacrifices to God and God preferred Abel’s sacrifice. Cain, angry at God, killed his brother.

We tend to regard this whole story about the offerings as “unfair” to Cain, because we can’t easily see why Cain was treated this way by God. But the inferences we can draw from the whole story (his anger, his pride, his despondency, his giving-in to sin) point to Cain’s attitude & character, not his offering. Sin was “crouching” at Cain’s door; then Cain acts on the sinful impulse.  In this story, sin prevailed in Cain’s heart and conduct.

The point is that we can never really know someone’s heart, and anger, malice, and self-delusion can motivate someone to murder, even if we can’t see or understand why they would.  What we can do, and what we do every day in various ways, is look at someone’s actions and infer their intentions from what we are able to observe.  This isn’t to say that Syed (or any other suspect) is undeniably guilty, but simply to say that those who believe a 17 yr old just wouldn’t kill in this situation are not recognizing how human nature works.

• The second observation concerns those, including Sarah Koenig, who want the main focus of the story to be about how rotten the American criminal justice system is. I’m quite willing to believe that there are lazy, corrupt and evil police, defense lawyers, prosecutors and judges. Every human and human institution has the capacity for laziness, corruption and evil-doing. But, rather than let professionals (magistrates, judges, etc.) or the powerful (political figures) decide guilt and punishment (which is how it works most places in the world), our system requires ordinary citizen jurors to hear the evidence from both sides, weigh that evidence and decide guilt based on their collective view of the case. That’s huge, and often overlooked or under-appreciated by those who criticize a case where they disagree with the outcome.

Our system also has numerous mechanisms to deal with errors and misconduct- if there truly was a Brady rule violation here, then perhaps vacating Syed’s conviction is appropriate. But don’t confuse that with the ultimate and perhaps unknowable question of whether Syed really did kill her.

• Finally, most criminal cases are messy and each side’s case has strengths and weaknesses. Sarah Koening didn’t pick this case for her story in the inaugural edition of Serial because it was clean and clear; to the contrary, Syed’s case is, indeed, messy.  In our system, jurors have to weigh the value of all the conflicting evidence and come to a decision. Here, they concluded Syed was guilty.

I wasn’t a juror in Syed’s trial, but I still lean towards accepting the jury’s verdict there.  We may yet hear more of the story and learn facts that could change my mind.  We’ll see, but I suspect that we may never know with certainty who strangled Hae Min Lee.