QMC Criminology

Podcasts

Season OneA high-school senior named Hae Min Lee disappeared one day after school in 1999, in Baltimore County, Maryland. A month later, her body was found in a city park. And two weeks after that, her former boyfriend and classmate, 17-year-old Adnan Syed, was arrested for the crime. He was convicted, and sentenced to life in prison. Syed has always said he had nothing to do with Lee’s death. Sarah Koenig sorted through thousands of documents, listened to trial testimony and police interrogations, and talked to everyone she could find about what happened between Adnan Syed and Hae Min Lee. What she discovered is a story far more complicated than the jury, or the public, ever got to hear.

Serial: Season ThreeSerial is heading back to court—this time, in Cleveland.

Season TwoIn May 2014, a U.S. Special Operations team in a Black Hawk helicopter landed in the hills of Afghanistan. Waiting for them were more than a dozen Taliban fighters and a tall American, who looked pale and out of sorts: Bowe Bergdahl. Bergdahl, a U.S. soldier, had been a prisoner of the Taliban for nearly five years, and now he was going home. President Obama announced Bergdahl’s return in the Rose Garden, with the soldier's parents at his side. Bergdahl's hometown of Hailey, Idaho, planned a big celebration to welcome him back. But then, within days—within hours of his rescue, in fact—public reaction to his return flipped. People started saying Bergdahl shouldn’t be celebrated. Some of the soldiers from his unit called him a deserter, a traitor. They said he had deliberately walked off their small outpost in eastern Afghanistan and into hostile territory. Hailey canceled its celebration. The army launched an investigation. Finally, in March, the military charged Bergdahl with two crimes, one of which carries the possibility of a life sentence. Through all of this, Bergdahl has been quiet. He hasn’t spoken to the press or done any interviews on TV. He’s been like a ghost at the center of a raucous fight. Now, in Season Two, we get to hear what he has to say. For this season, Sarah Koenig teams up with filmmaker Mark Boal and Page 1 to find out why one idiosyncratic guy decided to walk away, into Afghanistan, and how the consequences of that decision have spun out wider and wider. It’s a story that has played out in unexpected ways from the start. And it’s a story that’s still going on. Season Two aired in the winter of 2015-6 and is now complete. Listen again from the beginning.

Highly recommended podcasts running currently on BBC Sounds

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Prison Break - Episode 1: We've survived, haven't we? - BBC SoundsFormer 'prison wife' Josie Bevan confronts the failings of the prison system.

BBC Radio 4 - The Great Post Office Trial, Parts 1-5The extraordinary story of a campaign to uncover a massive scandal at the Post Office.

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