As Serial sweeps the nation, so do theories, backlash think-pieces, and more theories. Who murdered Hae Min Lee? Is Jay lying? Could Adnan really be as innocent as he says? As Sarah Koenig uncovers more details and anecdotes about what happened one day in January some 15 years ago, more of us become armchair detectives, obsessing over every detail. We’ve even gotten into the mix with The Serial Serial, our podcast about a podcast. Yesterday, over at Gawker, Josie Duffy looked at some of the details that Sarah Koenig isn’t obsessing over—namely, the situation that Baltimore was in back in 1999. Duffy says that the prosecutor’s office was an overwhelmed, incompetent mess, and she addresses some serious issues with racial profiling that Koenig has so far mostly ignored. Duffy, who’s a racial and economic justice lawyer in Brooklyn, suggests that the answers we all want may lie not in individual testimonies, but in the state of the Baltimore police and justice systems. Duffy writes:
But if Koenig wants to know if Jay is lying and why—if she wants to know how Adnan got either sold out or was framed—she’s not going to find the answer in a stale analysis of the day’s details. She’s going to find it in the police interrogation room or in a private meeting with the prosecutor.
You can read Duffy’s entire piece on Gawker.