PODCAST: CONVICTED SEASON 1

PODCAST: CONVICTED SEASON 1 

Convicted Season 1 told the story of Richard Nicolas and his conviction for the murder of his two year old daughter, Aja. It explored the question "What if he didn't do it?".

MY VERDICT: I thoroughly enjoyed this podcast, despite the horrific nature of the crime itself. The podcast is well narrated, well structured and you felt that you were given all the necessary information on the case. It’s not a case to be solved but rather the podcast asks the question – was this person, Richard Nicolas, given a fair trial? I believe he wasn’t. There’s instances of information given as scientific fact that is misinterpreted and this itself seemed to be what the whole prosecution depended the guilty verdict upon.

This podcast does share a lot of similarities with the case in Serial. In fact Richard Nicolas and Adnan Syed shared a defence attorney and were housed in the same prison. However there are also lots of differences. The shows creator Brooke Gittings is not a journalist, she’s a social worker, her style is more informal, and despite this she does a brilliant job. She keeps an open mind and gives you information, like what it’s like to visit someone in prison, that you wouldn’t necessarily get from other true crime podcasts. There’s also a lot of information missed from the likes of serial, like what comes next, the exhausting amount of legal proceedings that one has to go thorough to appeal a conviction and attempt to get a new trial. 

This podcast had me hooked from the start and was deeply engaging. I would recommend to anyone who was a Serial fan.

PODCAST: BREAKDOWN SEASON 1

The jury deliberated for 40 minutes before returning a guilty verdict. And at 27 years old, Justin Chapman was sentenced to life in prison, with no possibility of parole for 30 years.

The investigation was also brief, and the trial lasted only a few days. It was swift justice in a quiet little town that is unused to murder: Bremen, Ga., population 6,300, lies about 50 miles west of Atlanta near the Alabama line.

The prosecutor remains certain to this day that he got the right man, and Chapman may well be guilty of the crime that killed Alice Jackson, 79. But his case is also an example of repeated breakdowns at nearly every level of the criminal justice system in Georgia.

MY VERDICT: This podcast was one of the many recommended by those ‘podcast similar to serial’ posts. This podcast is only similar to serial in that it is a serial telling of a single story, in every other way it is seriously lacking. I feel slightly bad in giving this one a bad review as it is clear that everyone involved worked hard on researching the story and trying to find an interesting narrative. Unfortunately, this story is not a particularly compelling one. A man’s house is burnt down and his neighbor dies in the fire and he is found guilty of setting his house alight. It is heartbreaking that he was found guilty with what seems to be absolutely no evidence but it just seems odd to me that someone would feel that this story would keep a listener entertained for more than one episode. This podcast is seven episodes long, and I held out to the end hoping for something to shock or excite, but unfortunately I was disappointed. It’s possible that I was spoilt by listening to some amazing podcasts but I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone. That being said it’s possible that the other seasons (there are now six) might be worth listening to, they might have more entertaining stories.

Book 74: In Cold Blood: Truman Capote

In Cold Blood is a 1966 book by American author Truman Capote detailing the brutal 1959 murders of Herbert Clutter, a successful farmer from Holcomb,Kansas, his wife, and two of their four children. When Capote learned of the quadruple murder, before the killers were captured, he decided to travel to Kansas and write about the crime. He was accompanied by his childhood friend and fellow author Nelle Harper Lee, and together they interviewed local residents and investigators assigned to the case and took thousands of pages of notes. The killers, Richard "Dick" Hickock and Perry Smith, were arrested some six weeks after the murders, and Capote ultimately spent six years working on the book. The book became the greatest crime seller at the time and is almost universally acknowledged as one of the best books of its type ever written.