Posted by: Contributing columnist, Clarion-Ledger, Business, February
17, 2016:
Over a five-day period ending last week an amazing thing happened. Millions of people followed updates on Twitter and Periscope and waited in anticipation for daily podcasts about a legal hearing. This was a hearing that wasn’t televised, wasn’t about a celebrity, and was related to a 1999 murder. The fact that so many people were following the hearing wasn’t even the amazing part. The truly amazing part of the story was that some of the evidence presented and apparently even some of the theories presented by the prosecution were investigated, revealed and vetted by everyday people on the Internet.
To understand how the Post-Conviction Relief hearing for Adnan Syed in Baltimore came to be so closely followed, we need to go back to October 2014 and Season 1, Episode 1 of the podcast “Serial.” When Sarah Koenig of “This American Life” fame introduced the story of the murder of Hae Min Lee to the world, the story was already 15 years old and was being produced for a platform — podcasting — that seemed to have become relegated to a niche audience. It was probably a big surprise, then, when “Serial” became the most popular podcast in history with more than 80 million downloads and not only brought the conviction of Adnan Syed to the forefront, but also revived and rejuvenated podcasts in general.
Several podcasts have spun-off from “Serial” including “Undisclosed — The State v. Adnan Syed” and “Truth & Justice” as the most popular. These podcasts haven’t just discussed the story more but have gone into much deeper analysis of the legal issues, the evidence, the over-reaching by the police and the prosecutors, and many other details. They haven’t exactly solved the case, but they have certainly led most everyone I know to be convinced that the 2000 conviction of Syed was a miscarriage of justice. I’m now completely convinced that he is innocent —not just that he shouldn’t have been found guilty.
The fascinating part to me has been the role that these podcasts have played in revealing and analyzing actual evidence in the case. While there have been continuous pockets of Reddit discussions where the contributors believe Syed is guilty, there have been many websites and discussions where his innocence is proclaimed and alibis and evidence to prove his innocence are revealed and discussed.
While the Internet is rife with crazy conspiracy theories and completely fictional stories, it’s a great place to gather even the most obscure information. Do you want to know someone who worked at Best Buy in Woodlawn, Maryland, in 1999? Need a copy of an actual timecard or employee ID from Lens Crafters? There is no better place than the Internet to ask for these — as long as you have millions of people willing to help you look.
“Serial” wasn’t just a backdrop to the PCR hearing last week, it was mentioned in court through testimony, and transcripts from the podcast were read into evidence. One of the key witnesses testified that she didn’t even know she mattered very much to Syed’s defense until she was told of her importance while being interviewed for the podcast. It also seemed amusingly clear that the prosecutor arguing the case for the state seemed to have gotten many of his ideas and even alternate scenarios for how Syed could have committed the crime from reading posts on Reddit. The big reason that his ideas didn’t seem to have much legal sway, however, was that he hadn’t been able to mobilize a virtual army to gather evidence for his side, so he mostly just offered those theories without any evidence.
Through instant Twitter updates and frequent live Periscope videos from just outside the courtroom, the proceedings were able to be relayed very quickly despite the hearing not being televised. This led to several lawyers essentially creating briefs that could later be used in arguments within the hearing, and one affidavit seems to have been driven by the word getting to a potential witness that the situation was being misrepresented in the hearing.
As groundbreaking as “Serial” was to the Syed case, I can’t help but feel that there is something even bigger going on. The spin-offs, like “Undisclosed” and “Truth & Justice,” and spin-offs of the spin-offs, like “Real Crime Profile,” are now moving on to other cases and are likely to use the same virtual army to investigate them. With Netflix’s successful “Making a Murderer” documentary being compared by many to “Serial,” more and more people are now able to gather their own evidence and opinions based on more than just the normal soundbites of news coverage. Who knows what impact those efforts will have on different cases, but the phenomenon of crowdsourcing information and even crowdsourcing usable evidence for active trials and hearings is no doubt going to have an important bearing on legal proceedings going forward.
Tony Jeff is the president and CEO of Innovate Mississippi. He can be reached at tjeff@innovate.ms.