Amy Berg‘s 4-part HBO series The Case Against Adnan Syed is about to have a fifth part. The Oscar-nominated, crime-focused documentarian has spent nearly a year in Maryland filming the follow-up episode during Adnan Syed’s trial, and will certainly have more to cover now that his conviction for the murder of Min Hae Lee has been overturned. Berg was there in the courtroom when Baltimore City Circuit Judge Melissa Phinn announced the ruling.
While the docuseries may have explored all facets of the case for and against his guilt, the real-life trial also directly referenced evidence uncovered by the series, which will now, like a mirror reflecting another mirror, potentially explore its own role in the process of Syed going free.
“We knew the end of The Case Against Adnan Syed was not the end of this story, and we’ve been closely following every twist and turn in the case since the series premiered in March 2019,” Berg explained in a press release. “It’s gratifying to see many of the questions and issues probed in the original episodes come to bear on the events of this week.”
Syed was originally convicted and sentenced in 2000, the Serial podcast took up the question of his guilt in 2014 (for better and worse), and it seemed like he would stay in prison when the Supreme Court rejected his request for a new trial in 2019. Yet, Baltimore prosecutors filed a motion September 15, 2022, arguing that the original prosecutors had mishandled evidence, and their case was strong enough that Syed was out of prison only four days later. Hopefully this new entry in The Case Against Adnan Syed will offer a fuller picture of what might be the end of a story the world became obsessed with back during the Obama administration.