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Conor Friedersdorf, Lenika Cruz, Tanya Basu, and Katie Kilkenny discuss the latest episode of WBEZ Chicago's popular non-fiction podcast Serial.

Friedersdorf: Episode 10 of Serial begins by addressing the question of anti-Muslim prejudice. Did it play a role in putting Adnan in prison? Adnan's mother declares that when she explains to herself what happened, discrimination against Muslims is the only rationale she can come up with. She believes her son is innocent, that anti-Muslim prejudice is the reason he was arrested, and that everyone in the local Muslim community feels the same way. "Because it was a Muslim child, that's why they took him," she said. "It was easier to take him than other people."

Sarah Koenig is skeptical of anti-Muslim bigotry as The One Cause, presumably because there were definitely other factors that played a significant role. When a teenage woman dies, of course the ex-boyfriend is at least a person of interest. When another person, with no apparent motive to lie, flat-out accuses the ex-boyfriend of the murder, of course he is a suspect. When the ex has no alibi, of course that makes it even worse. And was it really easier for police to take Adnan, an honor student and part-time EMT voted most popular at school dances, than Jay, a black drug dealer with piercings and tattoos? I can't perform a rigorous analysis of the competing kinds of racism at play, but it's at least unclear.

At the same time, Koenig presents evidence that anti-Muslim prejudice played a definite role at different points in Adnan's case, from jury selection, when one potential juror confessed that he couldn't be fair to a Muslim defendant because a Muslim friend of his mistreats his wife, to a bail hearing when a prosecutor keeps referring to Adnan as a Pakistani (instead of American) and fabricates a pattern of cases where Pakistanis kill women and flee back to their home country. In previous episodes, we've also heard how stereotypes about Muslims tinged the prosecution's account of Adnan's motives. Whether or not Adnan is guilty, it's difficult to come away from this deep dive into his case without concluding that he would've gotten a fairer trial in ways big and small if he had not been a Muslim. And that's true even though his trial began before the September 11 terrorist attacks, which caused anti-Muslim bigotry and hate crimes to spike in the United States.

The rest of episode 10 focuses on Adnan's defense attorney, Cristina Gutierrez, and whether she bungled the trial in order to set herself up to make money on the appeal. Parts of her strategy are second-guessed, and there's a long bit near the end where we learn about her strange behavior late in her career: asking clients for large cash payments that never made their way to the legal experts that they were supposed to bankroll, for example. But the tape that struck me most powerfully was just Gutierrez in the courtroom, cross-examining Jay. She's hard to follow, and more than that, she's just not likable. As a podcast fan, perhaps I'm accustomed to hearing voices that are particularly pleasant. I've happily listened to Koenig for hours. Even short clips of Gutierrez are grating, and while clips designed to convey this quality were chosen, I am nevertheless convinced that I'd hate to sit through an hours long trial listening to her. I know it as surely as I know that I'd hate to spend hours listening to Gilbert Gottfried.

Something like that shouldn't matter in a trial deciding a man's fate. But that doesn't mean that it didn't.

Basu: For me, the first part of the episode that Conor mentions is at least thought provoking: What role, if any, did race play in Adnan’s trial?

The pre-9/11 anti-Muslim sentiment is introduced by Shamim Rahman, Adnan Syed's mother, who thinks racial bias played a role in her son's conviction. At first, Koenig isn't so sure, perhaps naively so, wondering if Shamim is simply being a protective mother, blindly accusing those who put her son in jail. But Koenig's subsequent exploration of this potential bias in the case (though perhaps late for only being introduced in episode 10 and possibly in response to the spate of white-reporter-privilege stories flooding Internet commentary regarding the series) is thorough; "parsimonious," perhaps, but necessary and eye-opening.

In particular, the fact that honor killings are brought up as a potential motive for Adnan entails a not-so-subtle vein of a xenophobic stereotype that is in some ways shocking and yet also (sadly) expected. Honor killings, briefly, are murders of women who have somehow hurt their families’ reputations. Here, the prosecution implies that Adnan killed Hae to protect his own honor in the face of Islam and his family's disapproval of his relationship with a woman outside the faith and Pakistani culture.

Killing an ex-girlfriend over a lover’s squabble gone too far is a timeless narrative, but what sparked my interest here was the fact that the universality of this type of crime was lost on many observers. Here stood before the jury a man whose skin, name (at one point, an observer online off-handedly remarks about Hae's choice of boyfriend, "But who lets their daughter date someone named Adnan Masud Syed?"), and cultural heritage apparently beg for an alternate explanation. The motive couldn't be one of jealousy or rage, but had to do with "honor" that was "besmirched," hearkening to another dimension and world where a girlfriend was property. It made me wonder: What if Adnan was white, or, as Conor wonders, if he was black and tattooed and dealing drugs? Regardless of if he was black or white, it’s unlikely the idea that this was an honor killing would have even crossed anyone's mind. Would the case have been reduced to simply one of blinding fury? Would the jury be swayed either way? Would Adnan, most importantly, have a culture to "blame" for his actions? Culture, in other words, or at least perceived culture, are looming motives in cases, and we are left to wonder if Adnan's cultural background has anything at all to contribute to this murder.