• Lady Swings Dead Baby

Innocent until proven guilty. Society puts great faith in that phrase, so much faith that one thing has been all but forgotten. The premise is noble, but it has no basis in reality or fact. If you’ve committed a crime, you’ve committed a crime, whether anyone but you ever knows that or anyone can ever prove it. The end.

Far from representing the power of justice, the presumption of innocence exists to acknowledge the responsibilities and the limitations of justice. “Innocent until proven guilty” is a conceptual compromise that sounds like a statement of fact. It’s a guideline, not a truth. Neither infallible nor impartial, it’s simply part of a foundation constructed to allow trials to proceed as fairly as possible, a “clean slate” starting point that makes it clear that it’s up to the prosecution to show that a person is guilty, not up to the defence to show that he isn’t.

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Adnan Syed was proven guilty of murdering his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, a decade and a half ago in Baltimore, and the podcast Serial this week completed 20 hours of broadcast rumination on whether that verdict was credible. The series, hosted by journalist Sarah Koenig, became a worldwide phenomenon, attracting a self-appointed jury of millions, including myself.

There has been controversy over whether Serial – of which there is to be a second series – is innovative journalism or irresponsible journalism. Miscarriages of justice do happen, of course, and have long been investigated by the media. Usually, information is released to the public when the investigation is over, and its purpose and meaning is clear. Koenig was candid about the fact that her investigation might end without conclusion. She was neither prosecution nor defence. She presumed Syed neither guilty nor innocent. She was simply intrigued, as were her listeners.

A number of commentators have pointed out that the dead girl seems to have been all but forgotten, amid all the chatter about what a nice chap Syed seems. A similar point was made about Peter Morgan’s script for The Lost Honour of Christopher Jeffries, a two-part television show that dramatised the consequences of the failure of the press to heed the presumption of innocence in the wake of a retired schoolteacher’s wrongful arrest for the murder of Joanna Yeates in Bristol in 2010. The point, actually, is made so often that “What about the dead woman?” has almost become a piece of standard “whataboutery”.

But what about the dead woman? In the case of Jeffries, the general conclusion – and the conclusion of the television drama – is that the press published lurid and speculative material because Jeffries was a bit different, a bit eccentric, and therefore seemed likely, to the bigoted eye, to be a murderer, too. But the eccentricity merely supplied the material. What provided the press with impetus to seek out that detail was a lack of respect, both for the dead woman and for the demands of the process that could deliver her all that was left to be delivered: justice.

It’s interesting that in the case of Syed, the opposite pertains. People want to believe that Syed is innocent because he is not a bit different, or a bit eccentric. On the contrary, he seems like a sweetheart, a man who has even made the very best he could out of spending his life in prison. If that man is innocent, you find yourself thinking, then he is a hero for bearing this injustice with such dignity. If he is guilty, you find yourself thinking, then maybe he is so horrified that he’s blocked it from his mind. You glorify the idea of Syed’s innocence. You minimise the ignominy and horror of his guilt.

Lady Swings Dead Baby

Syed’s charm and popularity provided Koenig with plenty of material, and also hooked listeners into caring about him. Had Syed been some truculent and ungracious creature, Serial would not have captured imaginations. Yet, just as the British press showed a lack of respect for Yeates and the process of justice, this podcast does something similar. Obviously, a person’s character has a bearing on whether they’re a murderer. But all that really counts is evidence.

Of this, Serial had little more than the newspapers that rushed to publish insinuations about Jeffries did. Was it respectful to Lee to stir up so much attention, so much speculation? There was, after all, very little to offer to her memory, or to her family, in terms of establishing an alternative truth about her demise. Maybe we have all become so used to the staple of a murdered woman as the driver of fictional entertainment that it’s too easy to hop over the more serious line into factual entertainment.