On September 20 2022, Adnan Sayed had his murder conviction overturned by a Baltimore judge after spending nearly 23 years in jail. His case had featured in the groundbreaking true crime podcast Serial.
As well as garnering an international following and spawning an entire genre of true-crime audio, TV and film, Serial’s investigation of Sayed’s case prompted discussion about the role of the media in uncovering wrongful convictions – in the UK as well as the US.
Unfortunately, the inevitable consequence of a broken criminal justice system, as the UK’s has consistently been described, is that some people will be wrongfully convicted. In response to the Sayed ruling, the BBC presenter Justin Webb asserted that podcasts were “the place to go” for innocent people wrongly convicted. I am not convinced.
