‘Serial’ Season 3 Returns With Look at Cleveland Justice System

Sarah Koenig’s hit crime podcast returns on Sept. 20

Serial
Serial

A new season of the hit crime podcast “Serial” is coming back to the airwaves on Sept. 20, the show announced in a tweet. Sarah Koenig’s investigative journalistic show for its third season and will travel to a courtroom in Cleveland and will spend a year within the Cleveland criminal justice system and analyzing one court case a day.

“Every case we looked into, there came a time when I said, this can’t be happening, and then it did,” Koenig said in a new trailer for the show.

This season will focus on the criminal justice system as a whole, looking at a variety of cases across an entire season rather than probing into one. The show will take place in Cleveland because they were allowed to film in and out of courtrooms and beyond.

The first trailer provides a preview of a mugging case in which a judge is badgering a defendant to take a plea agreement and reduce his prison sentence instead of going to trial. Koenig said that the defendant chose to represent himself rather than take representation from a lawyer and that the case had “a litany” of red flags.

“Either Greg Rutger was innocent, or he was bonkers,” Koenig says in the trailer. “What are the chances I would wander into a wrongful prosecution right off the bat?”

The award-winning podcast “Serial” is produced by This American Life and WBEZ Chicago. The first season followed a murder case in Baltimore of the convicted Adnan Syed. And the second season focused on Sgt. Bowe Berghdal, an American soldier in Afghanistan who was held by the Taliban and charged with desertion.

Listen to the Season 3 trailer here.

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