Undisclosed: the State vs. Adnan Syed is a new (fortnightly?) podcast from a group of lawyers who have been blogging about the case since it was made a public obsession by the Serial podcast. Both parties are at pains to point out that this new thing has no connection with the old thing, except you have to have listened to the old thing in order to understand this new thing.

I hope that’s clear. I had read two of these lawyer-bloggers (Susan Simpson, who writes View from LL2, and Rabia Chaudry, who writes Split the Moon), but was not aware of the third (Colin Miller, who writes Evidence Prof), so I knew that they had much, much more to say about the case, in greater detail, than the Serial podcast had time for. Some of the detail, you should be warned, can get pretty gruesome. If you’re squeamish about CSI and stuff like that, do not read Evidence Prof., for example.

So who is this for? You have to be really interested in this case. I know a lot of people ran out of steam with Serial, and lots of people were a bit bummed that it didn’t really have a conclusion. If you are one of those people, I don’t think Undisclosed is for you. Because this is going back over old ground in granular detail, exposing flaws and contradictions in the case and the evidence. Some of this points to Adnan’s innocence, some of it might not. Some of it just muddies the waters. What it does definitely achieve is the complete undermining of the prosecution case, which (as Serial listeners already know) was a narrative constructed to point to Adnan’s guilt, and which deliberately ignored or tweaked facts to fit.

The first episode goes right back to Serial’s first episode, and considers Adnan’s schedule on the day Hae Min Lee disappeared. It interrogates the witness statements assembled by the police (playing samples from the original recordings) and exposes their inconsistencies. For example, the business about track practice and what day it was, and when it started and what time Adnan arrived, what he was doing between the end of school and the start of practice, and how he participated when he got there. Or the differences between what one witness said at the first trial, and what she said at the second trial. Or the famous phone call that Adnan received at another witness’ house, his supposedly paranoid reaction, and when exactly this event took place (spoiler: possibly not on the day of Hae’s disappearance at all).

These people have examined the call logs not just of the day of Hae’s disappearance, but of other days, too. They expose some statements as being completely mistaken or misremembered. Unsurprisingly, they remind us just how much and how often Jay changed his story to fit the police case, whereas what Adnan said in 1999 and what he said in 2010 remains pretty consistent. Calls that were supposed to have been from Hae’s brother turn out probably not to have been, and so on.

It’s fascinating – but only if you have an affinity for these kind of granular details.

But this is not Serial. Most especially, it doesn’t have anywhere near the same quality audio. The sound is uneven – and I’m not just talking about the old recordings of witness statements. I think one of the three talks way too fast. The presentation, in short, is nowhere near as slick as Serial’s, and none of these lawyers would claim otherwise. So if what you enjoyed about Serial the most was the NPR-style richly layered soundscape, steer clear.

I’m personally always ready to learn more about this case in particular, and I’m definitely interested in understanding how prosecution and defence cases get constructed and how juries can be bamboozled by misleading evidence. So I enjoyed it and have subscribed.

Recommended for die hards.