INTRODUCTION
True crime listeners and legal professionals alike are all-too-familiar with the case of Adnan Syed. The story goes something like this: On an otherwise-typical school day in 1999, a seventeen-year-old high school student from Baltimore, Maryland, disappeared after class. Her name was Hae Min Lee, and her disappearance ultimately resulted in a tense investigation, multiple trials, and the wrongful conviction of Syed, her ex-boyfriend. After a fraught investigation, two trials, and a series of procedural mishaps, Syed was found guilty of Lee’s murder and sentenced to life in prison plus thirty years.
In 2014, however, Syed’s story took a turn. Over a decade after his conviction, Baltimore-based lawyer Rabia Chaudry contacted a journalist named Sarah Koenig and asked her to look into Syed’s case. When Koenig later opened the case file and started reading, she unknowingly embarked on a journey that would reveal the many injustices of his case and kick-start a nationwide true crime obsession.
When Serial first debuted, podcasts were a relatively obscure medium with little journalistic influence. But as the series became increasingly popular, so did investigative podcasts and the entire true crime genre. Other true crime podcasts began to appear, covering true crime cases in a narrative style similar to Serial. But, more importantly for Syed, Koenig’s investigation also opened the door for other, more procedural investigations into his conviction. The national spotlight on Syed’s story inspired criminal defense attorneys and innocence projects throughout the country to look into his case, which led to the discovery of multiple Brady violations during his trial. Although Syed’s conviction was recently reinstated, his initial exoneration sparked nationwide conversation about wrongful convictions and the pitfalls of the criminal justice system.
Some doubt that Syed’s case would have received any attention, let alone been closely re-examined, had Sarah Koenig not taken a chance on him in season one of Serial. Still, Syed’s story begs the question of whether true crime podcasts like Koenig’s do more harm than good in the realm of wrongful convictions. As this article will explain, the true crime genre is often at odds with the best interests of wrongfully convicted individuals and the criminal justice system as a whole—namely, through oversimplification of complex legal issues, inadequate treatment of racial and sociological issues, and reliance on notoriously untrustworthy eyewitness recollections.
Oversimplification of the Law and the Limitations of Narrative Structure
Although the narrative nature of true crime is effective at providing entertainment and drawing in large audiences, it often accomplishes these things at the expense of its listeners’ understanding of the criminal justice system. One common misconception among true crime listeners concerns the distinction between factual innocence and legal innocence. To create a compelling narrative, true crime media often centers around the question of factual innocence, to the exclusion of other factors that often result in wrongful convictions. This focus on factual innocence as opposed to legal innocence sometimes leads its audiences to assume that, in order to be wrongfully convicted, an individual must be factually innocent—or, alternatively, that exoneration necessarily suggests factual innocence. As any criminal defense attorney or volunteer for an innocence project will tell you, this is far from the truth. A wrongful conviction can be the result of any number of factors that have no relation to the guilt or innocence of the accused.
For example, Syed was exonerated not because of factual innocence, but because of the Brady violations that occurred during his trial. Had it not been for the prosecutorial misconduct that colored his conviction, Syed would not be free today, and there is still no conclusive evidence proving that he was factually innocent. If new evidence is uncovered that points to a different suspect in Lee’s murder, this could change; however, as of Syed’s release, the question of whether he killed Lee has no definitive answer. Still, for the sake of a compelling narrative, Serial and other true crime media discussing his case and conviction have focused largely on the issue of factual innocence, with the exception of Rabia Chaudry’s podcast Undisclosed, which took a deep dive into the legal shortcomings of his trial and conviction.
Widespread misunderstanding among true crime listeners regarding the issue of factual versus legal innocence may lead to the misconception that wrongfully convicted individuals only deserve to go free if they are completely innocent of any crime. In actuality, those who are declared legally innocent are entitled to freedom regardless of factual innocence. The issue this poses for true crime, however, is that wrongful convictions due to procedural and prosecutorial mishaps do not make entertaining stories. As long as the goal of true crime is to present a compelling narrative, these misconceptions are likely to persist, further complicating the already-difficult journey for potential exonerees and the attorneys who represent them.
Failure to Address Sociological Issues and Systemic Inequities
In the same way that true crime creators are rarely experts on criminal law, they are also rarely experts on the deep-seeded social justice issues that impact wrongful convictions. As a result, true crime podcasts and documentaries sometimes omit important discourse surrounding the racial dynamics implicit (or, in many cases, explicit) in the cases they cover. Serial presents one of the most glaring examples of such an omission in true crime media.
Over Serial’s twelve episodes, Koenig rarely touches on the topics of race and ethnicity, except to reference the prosecution’s theory that Syed’s motive to kill Lee stemmed from his Muslim culture. Yet ethnic and racial dynamics implicate nearly every aspect of the story. Syed was the first-generation child of Pakistani Muslims; Lee was the daughter of a conservative Korean family; Jay Wilds was a young Black man in the Baltimore area who was known to participate in petty drug-dealing. Given the many sociocultural dynamics at play among those involved in this case, the Baltimore police, the city of Baltimore as a whole, and the relationship between racial discrimination from law enforcement and the wrongful conviction of non-white individuals, the treatment of this topic in Serial is deeply problematic.
Serial’s blindspot regarding race and ethnicity becomes evident at one particular point in the series. During episode ten, Koenig is discussing the racial component of the case with Syed’s mother, Shamim Syed, who told Koenig: “everybody feel[s], the whole community, because he was a Muslim child, that’s why they took him. It was easier for them to take him than other people . . . because we are Muslim and we are minor in this country.” Koenig then pauses the audio to say to her audience in her signature narrative style: “You can hear me not believing her, right? The notion that the cops and prosecutors in this case were driven by anti-Muslim feeling, by racism, and by racism alone, that I found very hard to believe. And I still don’t believe that, by the way.”
Such an over-simplified response to a deeply complicated issue is far from surprising, but it does provide an example of how true crime can inadequately address demographic issues. Serial presents a rather glaring example of how true crime can misrepresent racial and ethnic issues within the criminal justice system. Koenig’s initial skepticism regarding Shamim Syed’s claim that the Baltimore police targeted Adnan partially because of his Muslim religion and Pakistani heritage reflects a reluctance to acknowledge the role race plays in wrongful convictions, despite an overwhelming body of evidence showing racial disparities in this area. However, it is also reflective of broader issues regarding the treatment of race in the true crime genre as a whole. True crime media overwhelmingly centers white victims and communities, and caters to a largely white audience. It is therefore doubtful that true crime podcasts like Serial can accurately capture the nuances of racial dynamics as they relate to already-complicated cases like Syed’s, and may instead perpetuate harmful stereotypes regarding race relations and people of color.
The Unreliability of Eyewitness Recollections
One of the most persistent issues in the field of wrongful convictions is the unreliability of eyewitness accounts. At least seventy percent of wrongful convictions involve eyewitness identification, the validity of which can be affected by a number of factors such as implicit bias, poor visual conditions, the passage of time, and the unreliability of memory. Yet, despite these problems, eyewitness accounts are often the crux of true crime media. If, as many wrongfully convicted individuals know all too well, human memory is often insufficient to accurately recall what happened one week ago—let alone in months, years, or even decades past—can it really provide an adequate foundation for a twelve-episode series about a twenty-year-old murder?
Much of Sarah Koenig’s investigation into Syed’s case involved conversations with classmates or acquaintances sharing recollections from the day of Lee’s disappearance. In episode nine, for example, Koenig discussed two bystander recollections that tended to prove Syed’s innocence. The first was called in by a woman who claimed that, at the time of Lee’s murder, there were no pay phones at the local mall Best Buy in Woodlawn. This mattered because Jay Wilds claimed that Syed had called him from a Best Buy payphone after killing Lee, and that Syed was standing next to the payphone when Wilds picked him up.
The second memory was shared by a classmate of Lee’s, who claimed that, according to her memory, the state’s theory that Lee had been murdered by 2:36 P.M. on January 13th was impossible. The classmate, who was a co-manager of the high school wrestling team along with Lee, said that she had chatted with Lee about the wrestling match they had to attend that afternoon. She said that the conversation occurred after school got out around 2:15 P.M. and lasted for at least ten minutes, which meant that the state’s timeline for Lee’s murder wouldn’t have been possible.
Although these memories create a compelling narrative, they belie the fact that human memory is incredibly unreliable. The unreliability of such recollections is due in part to a phenomenon called unconscious transference. Unconscious transference occurs when the witness confuses a person seen in one situation with someone seen in a different situation. For example, when a witness is asked to pick a suspect out of a police lineup and sees one of the bystanders present at the scene of the crime, he may incorrectly relate his familiarity with the bystander to the perpetrator.
Further, the human mind is simply not wired to accurately recall mundane events from years in the past, as numerous individuals did in Serial. In fact, scientific findings suggest that we can unknowingly modify our memories when we recall them. This means that the memories a person thinks about most, and therefore feels the most confident about, are also the most likely to be inaccurate. Paradoxically, the most accurate memories a person has are ones that suddenly resurface after not thinking about them since the moment they happened. It is not outside the realm of possibility that Syed’s alibi witness, Asia McClain, incorrectly recalled seeing Syed in the library on the day of Lee’s disappearance due to subconscious modification of her memory after hearing about Syed’s arrest.
The amount of scientific evidence surrounding the unreliability of eyewitness accounts, and the ease with which they can be influenced by law enforcement and the media, is staggering, and the passage of time only worsens the potential for inaccuracies. The problems presented by Serial’s approach, then, are twofold. First, for the sake of telling an interesting story, the podcast largely overlooked the legal considerations (i.e., Brady violations) that ultimately caused Syed’s conviction to be reexamined in favor of decades-old memories that were legally worthless. Second, because Koenig’s narrative revolved largely around bystander recollections from fifteen years’ prior, it failed to present reliable evidence regarding the identity of Lee’s true killer.
If the success of Serial is any indication, reliance on questionable reliance on eyewitness accounts is practically woven into the D.N.A. of the true crime genre. But unfortunately for the wrongfully convicted individuals at the center of these narratives, gripping storylines built on distant memories are not enough to overturn convictions.
Potential Solutions
If Serial is any indication, the value of true crime media in terms of wrongful convictions seems to lie solely in the publicity it garners towards specific cases like Syed’s, but serious questions remain as to whether such widespread attention is worth the complications true crime narratives can pose for exoneration efforts. While there is no one solution to all of the aforementioned problems, there are certainly measures true crime creators and legal professionals alike can take in order to benefit wrongfully convicted individuals through media platforms. One potential solution is for legal professionals to create their own podcasts and documentaries. Podcasts created by lawyers and legal scholars—rather than journalists, celebrities, or amateur sleuths—are more likely to meaningfully help wrongfully incarcerated individuals and those victimized by the criminal justice system. In Syed’s case, Rabia Chaudry’s podcast Undisclosed, which was created by a team of attorneys knowledgeable in the field of criminal law, actually contributed to his October 2022 exoneration by uncovering the many issues with the state’s case, as well as the prosecutorial misconduct that invalidated Syed’s conviction. Sarah Koenig’s Serial, by contrast, entirely glossed over the procedural issues that actually had the potential to overturn Syed’s conviction, focusing instead on the more intriguing question of his factual innocence. Unfortunately, this solution has one significant caveat: procedure-heavy podcasts like Undisclosed are simply not as interesting as narrative podcasts like Serial.
How, then, can podcasts like Serial be modified to better explain the law while still maintaining their popularity? The short answer is that the creators of true crime podcasts should work closely with attorneys, legal scholars, and experts in social science fields to present their narratives in a more effective and responsible manner that is more likely to help wrongfully convicted individuals and accurately portray demographic issues. As for the use of memory-based evidence to construct true crime narratives, podcast hosts and filmmakers should make sure to disclaim that eyewitness recollections are proven to be unreliable, and that phenomena such as unconscious transference have played a prominent role in many wrongful convictions. By honoring these recommendations, true crime creators might not present the most entertaining stories, but they would certainly better serve wrongfully convicted individuals and others victimized by the U.S. criminal justice system.
Conclusion
In 2014, when Serial became the first podcast to win a Peabody Award, Sarah Koenig candidly stated: “We did not expect Serial to get very much attention at all. … It’s a ten-hour audio documentary about an old murder that I did not solve. But people listened anyway, and a lot of people listened.”
Koenig and her team were right to be initially skeptical about the potential success of Serial: in the early 2010s, when podcasts were a little-known media platform and true crime was still a small niche in the entertainment industry, they would have had no reason to anticipate the monumental success the podcast would ultimately achieve. But now that true crime podcasts, documentaries, and television series have reached unprecedented popularity, creators must be held to a higher standard.
Going forward, true crime creators should learn from Serial’s mistakes and strive to present their content in the most socioculturally aware and legally sound manner possible. Then, and only then, will the true crime genre make more meaningful progress towards ensuring that those victimized by our criminal justice system receive actual justice.
Julia N. Brown is a third-year student at Northeastern University School of Law. Following graduation in May 2023, she plans to practice labor and employment law in the Greater Boston Area.