Episode 10 — Conflict of Interest

I felt the most important theme in this episode was conflict of interest.  First off, there was obviously the issue of the prosecutor assigning Jay a lawyer.  I was very much opposed to the logic that the judge used to dismiss Christina Gutierrez.  How is the judge to know how Jay viewed the prosecutor appointing him an attorney?  And wouldn't you simply feel safer around the prosecutor in the courtroom if he was aiding you in your pursuit of innocence.  How could Jay not construe it as a benefit?  How could he not see this as an unfair advantage?

To me though, the biggest bombshell was that Koenig had covered Christina Gutierrez's fall from grace and subsequent disbarment back when she worked for the Baltimore Sun.  Koenig told us in the first episode that she had not heard about the case until her friend had brought it to her attention.  In fact, the very crux of this series is based on the fact that Koenig had no previous knowledge or bias involving the case. But, this clearly isn't so.  Koenig is coming in with a bias of thinking Gutierrez was an unfit lawyer.  This changes my whole view of Koenig's investigation.  She is not, to me, a journalist searching for the truth as to what happened to Hae Min Lee and whether Adnan Syed was rightfully convicted, but instead, she's a journalist that came into this story to validate her beliefs and previous journalistic work.  I don't feel I would have been as upset by this if she had stated her bias from the beginning.  If in the first episode, she would have admitted that she had done journalistic research on Gutierrez's disbarment, and said she was aiming to see its effect on cases she was working at the end of her career.  But instead, she claims, as she has time and time again, that she's just an unbiased journalist searching for the truth.

Many times in the series she criticizes others for their bias, especially in this episode, and yet she admits her own bias.  Koenig came into the case having thought for 15 years that Gutierrez was an unfit attorney, so of course she thinks he's innocent and was a victim of an inadequate defense and that the system has failed him.