The Case Against Adnan Syed

Series premiere. Family and friends of Adnan Syed, who is currently serving a life sentence for the murder of his ex-girlfriend 18-year-old Hae Min Lee, recall their blossoming high-school romance, their emotional breakup, Lee's mysterious disappearance, the discovery of her body, and the events that led to Syed's arrest. After the podcast phenomenon "Serial" resurrects the cold case for millions, Syed's family prepares for his appeal in February 2016, and hope for a chance to discover the truth after nearly 20 years.

As Syed's appeal for a new trial gets underway, supporters look back at the 1999 confession of his friend, Jay Wilds, who claimed he helped Syed bury Lee's body. With questions remaining regarding the police's timeline of events, acquaintance Asia McClain becomes a key figure in providing a possible alibi for him. While private investigators consult experts in hopes of re-creating circumstances surrounding evidence in the case, the veracity of Wilds' testimony is called into question years later.

This episode illustrates how a case built on quick and shoddy police work was taken up by an unethical prosecutor (Kevin Urick) and willed into a conviction. It weaves together the story lines of Adnan's present day post-conviction appeal hearing (PCR) with his original trial, hinging on several key examples of unethical behavior that helped convict Adnan and are now being questioned at his PCR. We'll also dive into the politicized culture in which the trial took place. On one hand, the Korean community united to demand a conviction from a city they felt had systematically overlooked murders of Koreans. On the other, a Pakistani-Muslim community united around Adnan with great faith in the American justice system, only to see that faith destroyed by prosecutors who used Adnan's religion and ethnicity to label him a radical and a danger to his community. In the end, as he is convicted in 1999, that conviction is overturned in the present day, and he cautiously prepares for a new day in court. The episode will also be bound by stories from characters about how their lives were changed by the Serial, for better and worse, and how they question their own memories of events.

Eighteen years after he was convicted and almost a year after he won a new trial at the PCR hearing, Adnan Syed faces yet another hurdle: the endless morass of the appeals process. The state has appealed the decision to grant Adnan a new trial, and the episode begins at this appeal hearing, where we dig deeper into state's prosecutor Thiru Vignarajah and his motivations for taking Adnan's case. During the appeals process, Thiru announces a run for Baltimore City State's Attorney, and the politics of the prosecutorial system play out around Adnan's case while his lawyer (Justin Brown) fights to exonerate him once and for all. As various investigative and vérité threads draw to a close, this episode will reflect on all of the developments in Adnan's case, and the irony of an appeals process that drags on endlessly defending a conviction frozen in time, isolated from the many developments that have occurred since.