Josie Duffy’s analysis of Serial, a pod-cast about the murder of a Korean girl, is reviewed in her Gawker article “What Serial Gets Wrong”, by examining the many journalistic flaws portrayed in the podcast, from the author, Sarah Koenig. What Koenig forgets to imply is the flawed justice system of 1999’s America, the economic problems the city of Baltimore faced, and her intent of portraying a teen drama rather than an actual crime investigation like it should have been. Duffy addresses that Koenig doesn’t answer the critical question, on what flaws occurred to convict Adnan and instead Koenig comes up with her own assumption on lousy police work or the court room being biased against Muslims all in a span of less than an hour. While she …show more content…
justice system was in disarray. As State and private prison flooded the U.S. in the growing surge of the Super Predator Act, many young African Americans were convicted of crime, something Koenig knew while speaking to Adnan in prison during episode 10 of Serial were he states that, a majority of the people in the prison are black which Koenig simply nodes. On multiple occasions she factors in race but simply brushes it off, instead she believes its Jays lying and the investigators fault. In the book Crime and Punishment in America the author, Elliot Currie, states “by the mid-1990’s one in three young black men were under the “supervision” of the criminal justice system that is, in a jail or prison, on probation or parole or under pretrial release” (Currie, Pg.9). This is then in relation to Adnan Syed case when further read “the figure was two out of five in California, and over half in the city of Baltimore, Maryland” (Currie, pg. 9). While Adnan wasn’t black the staggering numbers that a majority of blacks were in prison coupled with the Super Predator act of the 90’s had clear marks throughout the serial pod-cast but Koenig simply chooses that it’s not important. Although with the overwhelming fact, the truth is mass incarcerations happened to blacks as well as minorities, but with Adnan being Muslim in the 90’s didn’t mean he would be under suspicion to commit
In episode 10, Koenig presents evidence anti-Muslim prejudice played a definite role at different points in Adnan's case. For example when prosecutor Vicki Wash kept referring to Adnan as a Pakistani, instead of Pakistani American, and then stated a pattern of cases where Pakistanis kill women and flee back to their home country. And when she claimed that because Adnan had strong support from the community, he had limitless resources of the entire community and as well claimed that he can tag resources from Pakistan as well. Wash also compared Adnan’s case to another teenage boy named Samuel Sheinbein, who was accused of murdering another teenager in the year 1997 and then fled to Israel. The focus of Adnan’s case was to prove if he was guilty or innocent, not to talk about his race or compare him to other serial killers who are also his race.
Serial, a podcast produced by Sarah Koenig, has brought the fifteen year old case of Adnan Syed back into deliberation. Public interest in the murder of Hae Min Lee has risen exponentially and there have been conflicting views on the innocence of Syed. On February 13, 1999, Hae Lee disappeared and her body was found in Leakin Park, just outside the city of Baltimore, Maryland. Adnan Syed, her ex-boyfriend, was the prime suspect and indeed, a Baltimore jury sentenced him for life on February 25, 2000. Despite that, Syed has always maintained his innocence and denies any involvement in her strangulation.
The Serial podcast captivated millions of listeners as it dug deep into the case of Adnan Syed, a man convicted of murdering his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee. While Syed's sentence to life in prison may initially seem justified, a closer examination of the evidence presented in the podcast raises significant doubts about his guilt. This essay aims to challenge Adnan Syed's sentence by presenting material from three episodes of Serial, revealing inconsistencies in the prosecution's case, unreliable witness testimonies, and the lack of conclusive evidence tying Syed to the crime. Throughout the podcast, several inconsistencies and discrepancies emerge, undermining the reliability of the prosecution's case against Adnan Syed.
“The Sentencing Reform Act of 1984” The article, “The Sentencing Reform Act of 1984” (2015), written by Eric Girault, persuades the audience that the enactment of the law did not reduce crime in societies, but was misappropriated, which caused a negative impact on families and their communities. Girault describes this by sharing his personal anecdote on receiving a harsh prison sentence for a non-violent crime as a first time offender. He uses trustworthy resources in order to substantiate his claim. Girault’s intended audience for this piece of writing is the general public, specifically those that lack knowledge of the law and its due process.
100). At the same time, however, police officers also target more Africa American communities due to high crime rates. Even though the crime rates in Black communities are not as high as it has been, those communities are still targeted. Mass incarceration, on the other hand, is not due to the fact of these crime rates. According to Alexander’s (2011) studies, “As of September 2009, only 7.9 percent of federal prisoners were convicted of violent crimes” (West & Sobol, 2010, p. 101).
Bryan’s writing structure in his book is professional by the way he would introduces different court cases he had previously worked on into each progressing personal thought and analysis over the topic of innocents on death row. From beginning to end the dictionary was my best friend when struggling through the author 's complex vocabulary. The selection of his vocabulary such as; menacing, discretionary, and unprecedented made it difficult to understand the author when he was expressing his thoughts or describing a scenario. His writing style is intelligent because even though his writing tends to be scholarly, there are ways to still create pictures with your head. His descriptive scenario gave me a tangible image of how it might’ve looked like and me feel in his position during this intense scene when a white male police officer pointed a gun to his face because he looked suspicious in the middle of the night sitting in his car.
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander published in 2012, is a 261 page book detailing how mass incarceration has become the new form of legalized discrimination. BACKGROUND A large cause for the writing of this book is that there is currently not much research or call for a criminal justice reform. According to Alexander the main goal of the book is to “stimulate a much-needed conversation about the role of the criminal justice system in creating and perpetuating racial hierarchy in the United States” (2012:16).
Through this, the American justice system emerged as a system of social and economic control over the nation’s black
Throughout history, African Americans have been wrongfully convicted of crimes. The Jim Crow era made it extremely hard for African Americans to live a peaceful life. Today, if African Americans are wrongly convicted about a crime or an issue, they do not make it to trial. Their trial beings when they are assaulted by law enforcement, the new lynch mob, Police corruption and brutality has been an ongoing problem within the United States frequently. Though African American youth have been targeted by the police, these events are happening all too often.
“African Americans now constitute nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population.” The majority group of this statistic are people who come from african american backgrounds. The fact that black people are to make up nearly half of the prison population alone, really conveys the rate at which they are being arrested. Black men are often victims of racial profiling by police. They are targeted by police officers, and security guards, and are accused of crimes unrelated to them, simply on the basis of their skin color.
Anya Schultz, the author of a review titled Serial: A Captivating New Podcast, works to show how multiple narratives and stories can be manipulated and sometimes vastly misinterpreted. Serial, an intriguing, enthralling podcast hosted by Sarah Koenig, tells the story of Hae Min Lee, a young, beautiful, high school senior who was murdered in 1999. Lee 's case, as Koenig and Schultz point out, has a few missing pieces of information that were never accounted for. For example, how did the jury come to the conclusion that Lee 's ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed, was truly guilty? Why did Syed 's lawyer forget to mention the letter from his acquaintance Asia McClain that could have polished his alibi?
“The worst form of injustice is pretended justice.” These words are spoken by Plato, a Greek philosopher; they speak for many injustices we have in today’s world and related directly to Adnan Syed and his conviction. In the podcast Serial, investigated by Sarah Koenig, released in 2014, she captures the journey of Adnan Syed’s conviction and the murder of Hae Min Lee in Baltimore, Maryland in 1999. Although there are many factors that point fingers at Adnan being guilty of the murder of Hae Min Lee, many things have been uncovered which can prove otherwise. Adnan Syed was targeted because of his racial, religious, and cultural differences; this, along with his lack of motivation to kill Hae Min Lee and the inconsistent stories of the State’s
Annotated Bibliography Alexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New York: The New Press. Alexander opens up on the history of the criminal justice system, disciplinary crime policy and race in the U.S. detailing the ways in which crime policy and mass incarceration have worked together to continue the reduction and defeat of black Americans.
Even though the story mainly takes place decades before now, the fact that Walter’s story happened in a time where I never realized how bad African Americans were treated even after so many societal victories a few decades before that, reminds me that it may still be possible despite current changes. My crime classes taught me that evidence can be faulty, even witnesses testimonies, which can result in innocent people going to jail. This book backed up that lessen and showed that even in ridiculous cases an innocent person can be victimized just based on what a jury decides. It is easy to believe that the justice system is just fine and trust it if you do not know the truth, but even Walter had faith in the system that inevitably put him on death row,
Discussion 8 My observation, regarding continuing racial inequality, would be the overwhelming population of African Americans in the prison I recently toured. I was standing alongside my Criminal Law professor, and we were both commenting about the racial disparity. No doubt, the men who are in prison have done something to be there, but are their crimes any less heinous than any other man arrested for the same offense, but given less time? Labels and selective perception plays a significant role in the placing of certain individuals in “boxes.”