“There are people that have been so devastated by this experience that they’re stuck in the past,” Berg said “You have to balance out what they’re saying now versus what they said back then and see if they’re actually telling the truth. We didn’t really run into that much in this project. What we ran into was more about the notoriety and fame of being a character in a story that went viral.

1. The Case Against Adnan Syed How Many Episodes
2. Watch The Case Against Adnan Syed Online Free
3. Where Is Adnan Syed Now

1. The physical evidence against Adnan Syed was scant - a few underwhelming fingerprints. So aside from cell records, what did the prosecutors bring to the jury,.
2. Apr 01, 2019  The Case Against Adnan Syed (Sky Atlantic) is the latest instalment in the story of her murder. Syed was a teenager when he was convicted of the.

The latest chapter in the saga of the murder of Hae Min Lee and conviction of Adnan Syed for the crime came to a close last night with the finale of HBO’s The Case Against Adnan Syed, which director Amy Berg and her team worked on for three-and-a-half years. Through interviews, research, and a team of private investigators and experts, Berg has constructed a solid argument for Syed getting.

So we had to be careful.” (Without offering a name, Berg said there was one person whose account was ultimately shelved because his or her story didn’t feel truthful.).

I dreaded pressing play on the first episode of HBO’s four-part docuseries The Case Against Adnan Syed, which debuts March 10. Thanks to Sarah Koenig’s hit podcast Serial, the story of Hae Min Lee’s 1999 murder—and her ex-boyfriend Adnan Syed, who was convicted of the crime but has always maintained his innocence—became, 15 years later, a much-discussed media phenomenon. Since its debut in 2014, the season has been downloaded —and spawned a phenomenon of media that re-litigates closed cases, from Netflix’s Making a Murderer to Amazon Prime’s recent Lorena. I listened to Serial, read about the case, participated in the discourse, and was ultimately left without clear answers; to revisit it all seemed like self-flagellation.Koenig’s instincts were strong: when reduced to its narrative elements, the story of Lee’s murder appeared to contain infinite, intriguing multitudes. The victim was Korean-American; the convicted murderer, Pakistani-American; the star witness, an African-American teenage boy, Jay Wilds. Against the backdrop of high school—prom, weekends smoking pot, chance encounters at the library—Lee’s murder pulls together multiple community stories, and then shows how the Baltimore justice system digested all of these details. But because Koenig framed the podcast around her circuitous and frequently stymied effort to try to ascertain the truth of a 15-year-old crime, listeners joined in on the journey.

Lee’s murder became a detective story, a playground of clues populated by characters with secrets to hide. And it became about anyone but Lee, as finding her murderer turned into a game that amateur sleuths were trying to win.Again, Koenig’s instincts were right: there were so many loose ends and missing pieces around the prosecution’s story—the story ruled to be the true story—that it could be picked apart, seemingly endlessly. But the armchair investigations took on a macabre air, with Lee’s life—and her family’s grief—reduced to the circumstances of her death.The Case Against Adnan Syed is quite different from Serial, but it is still a docuseries that aims to dredge up the demons around a now-20-year-old mystery. In several key details, it appears to be a rebuke to Serial specifically. One of its executive producers, Rabia Chaudry, is a family friend of Syed’s and an immigration lawyer, who has advocated for Syed’s innocence for years. She’s the woman who tipped Koenig off to Syed’s story in the first place, and in The Case Against Adnan Syed, Chaudry serves as key expert, addressing the pitfalls around the podcast’s success. The friends and witnesses who spoke to Serial tell in The Case Against Adnan Syed that the reporting, and Reddit threads dissecting their testimony and questioning their memories, took over their lives, as complete strangers began to meddle in this traumatic period of their lives.

The Case Against Adnan Syed How Many Episodes

Serial launched the case to a wide audience—but exposed the delicate workings of the investigation to the cudgel of media scrutiny, too. It did not help that after reopening this wound, Koenig ultimately didn’t come to any major conclusions—except to say, in the words of producer Dana Chivvis, that if Syed is innocent, he’s very, very unlucky.Chaudry and Berg are attempting something different here. Based on the first three of four planned installments, The Case Against Adnan Syed aims to exculpate Syed—and unlike Serial, the documentary suggests an exact and extremely plausible explanation for Wilds’s original testimony and Syed’s subsequent conviction. Serial never quite fully acknowledged the complex racial dynamics of the case—which include, as The Case Against reports, a contemporaneous string of murdered Korean-Americans, aspersions cast on the Pakistani-American community, and the long history of Baltimore police clashes with African-Americans.Wilds, who was reportedly a weed dealer, faced the police without a parent or a lawyer present. The Case Against presents seemingly persuasive evidence that the Baltimore police struck some kind of deal with him—give us the story we need, and we’ll give you the break you need. And whether or not Syed is guilty, the series contends that the story the prosecution presented can be poked full of holes. Lawyer Susan Simpson, who wrote about the case on her Web site TheViewFromLL2.com after listening to Serial, and serves as a charming on-screen expert for The Case Against, also takes apart the prosecution’s cell-phone data, pointing to metadata from AT&T that was intentionally withheld from the state’s expert witness before he took the stand.

Here, as elsewhere, The Case Against picks up a from Serial, and pulls until it unravels.The docuseries’s investigative work is top-notch: more nuts and bolts than Serial, but also able to profit off of the wide-ranging fact-finding the podcast inspired. The material presented in the documentary is what Syed’s legal team used to overturn his conviction in 2016—and what it presented. (The court will deliver a verdict.) Simpson makes a persuasive case for police misconduct, which should have been part of the narrative from the start. (It’s helpful that HBO subscribers can watch all five seasons of The Wire for a primer on the Baltimore police department’s methods around the time of the murder.)As a storytelling vehicle, The Case Against is less impressive.

Koenig’s loopy but frank meditations on truth, fact-finding, and reasonable doubt grounded the viewer in this peculiar, difficult-to-encapsulate case. By comparison, The Case Against seems cobbled together; the docuseries so directly addresses Serial that it’s really more of a companion piece than a stand-alone, offering pieces and angles that hadn’t been considered or discovered in 2014. It’s an appendix to Serial, really—a compilation of asterisks and footnotes, additional reading and citations.The Case Against also tries to re-center Lee in this narrative, which is admirable.

Watch The Case Against Adnan Syed Online Free

But it’s ineffective, particularly because Berg chooses to represent Lee by having a performer (assistant editor Anne Yao) read aloud excerpts from her diary, as an animated avatar of Lee re-enacts or imagines the entries. The animation is pretty, and the illustration of Lee’s prom outfit, which she was clearly proud of, is a nice touch. But there’s something skin-crawling about this, too, as if Lee cannot just stay buried. The docuseries has literally reanimated her—to the tune of K-Ci and JoJo’s “All My Life,” which played as Syed and Lee shared their first kiss, and Lana Del Rey’s “Tomorrow Never Came.” It’s grotesque—especially when the documentary appears to present this love story as an antidote to Syed’s guilt, as if domestic violence does not often go hand in hand with romance.

Where Is Adnan Syed Now

The Case Against wants to exonerate Syed more than it wants to document Lee; even in this framing, she’s still a character serving someone else’s purposes.Without the fourth and final episode available to critics, I can’t anticipate how Berg will rest her case. But the third episode, “Justice Is Arbitrary,” does make for good stand-alone viewing, especially if you’re curious about this series, but not that curious. That’s when Simpson lays out her interpretation of the cell-phone evidence and Wilds’s testimony, and when Berg delves into the details of each of these minority communities’ experiences in Baltimore in 1999.If what you wanted after Serial was more answers, The Case Against scratches that itch. If you want a more global reckoning of the psychological toll of two decades spent digging up the bodies—of the giddy romance between the true-crime genre, eager mystery-solving armchair detectives, and the lost, ever-more-distant past—you’ll likely to have to look elsewhere. It speaks volumes that Lee’s family declined to be interviewed, both for Serial and for The Case Against Adnan Syed, and that neither effort was able to create a rapport with Wilds, the prosecution’s key witness. The Case Against Adnan Syed may present more facts, but it has less to offer in the way of deeper, broader truth.