In Serial Season 3 Episode 1, Sarah Koenig reports on “Anna” (her real name is not used in the episode), who was charged with a felony after accidentally hitting a cop during a bar fight after she was slapped on the butt. The surveillance video is an important part of the episode, and you can watch the video above. There are minor spoilers for Season 3 Episode 1 below, but these do not reveal how the podcast episode ends.
In the video, you can see the man hit her butt multiple times and she tries to get him to stop. Another patron joins him and she gets more aggressive at trying to get them to stop slapping her butt. Her attempt at defending herself ends up getting her dragged into a fight where multiple people are hitting her, grabbing her hair, and beating on her. After she’s put into a headlock, she flails and accidentally hits a police officer.
At the beginning of the episode, her defense attorney Russ Benson walks Koenig through the video, talking about what happened. Benson believed the case should be reduced to a misdemeanor because it was obvious that when she hit the cop, it was accidental. But Jennifer King, the prosecutor, told Koenig at the beginning of the episode that it was a simple decision to prosecute as a felony because she hit a cop and she was still flailing after the police officer told them to break it up. She said the hit was somewhere between deliberate and accidental, but she was aggressively fighting.
Anna, meanwhile, said that she never hear the officer tell her to stop and didn’t even know an officer was there.
What do you think about the case after seeing the video?