In the final episode of the Serial podcast, host Sarah Koenig notes that producer Dana Chivvis thinks Adnan Syed has to be the unluckiest person in the world if he's completely innocent of the death of ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee. Koenig adds that "a lot of people see it this way."

I can think of 325 people who don't: the 325 people exonerated based on DNA testing. If you think Adnan must be the unluckiest person in the world to be innocent, pick a case profile at random. Your perspective might change.

"Unlucky" defendants and messy criminal cases are not rare in this country. If Adnan is innocent, his luck is no worse than than any person who has ever been wrongfully convicted.

In the documentary The Thin Blue Line, filmmaker Errol Morris debunked the murder conviction of Randall Adams by proving that each of five key witnesses for the prosecution committed perjury. In The Staircase, Michael Peterson was convicted of murder based on allegedly pushing his wife down a staircase. Peterson's conviction was eventually reversed after it turned out the state's blood expert greatly overstated his qualifications and experience.

Sometimes, bad luck is actually what happens when under-preparation meets opportunity.

While Adnan's case is in some ways very similar to the cases of people who have been wrongfully convicted, it is also in many ways different from the typical American criminal case.

Two key statistics: 95% of disposed American criminal cases are resolved by guilty pleas, often as a result of plea bargains. And 80% of people arrested in this country are represented by public defenders. These statistics are not unrelated. Public defenders are underfunded and overworked, and often refuse to take new cases.

In both of these senses, Adnan's case is unusual. First, his attorney didn't even ask about a plea deal. Second, that attorney, Cristina Gutierrez, was a private attorney. Adnan’s case was not the case of a defendant pleading guilty because his court-appointed attorney lacked the resources to present a vigorous defense at trial. Instead, Gutierrez was hired by Adnan’s family and paid around $100,000. She was also disbarred the year after Adnan was convicted. In a given year, only around .08% of attorneys are disbarred.

We can point where the trial and/or representation might have gone wrong, but it's tough to speculate on a case that doesn't follow a typical pattern, if there even is one.

These facts bring Adnan's case into clearer focus. In the first 70 DNA exonerations, 23% of the wrongfully convicted had received ineffective assistance of counsel. Several of these lawyers were disbarred. Many of these lawyers engaged in behavior similar to the actions of Gutierrez, as described in the tenth episode of Serial and articles surrounding her disbarment: failure to communicate with the client or communicating in a dismissive, callous or hurried manner, inadequate discovery/investigation, failure to test physical evidence and mishandling client funds.

If Cristina Gutierrez had called Asia McClain, the student who claims to have seen Adnan in the library at the alleged time of murder, as an alibi witness, would the jury have acquitted him? That's impossible to know. If Gutierrez had gotten DNA testing done, would the results have supported Adnan's innocence? If the UVA Innocence Project has its way, we may soon find out.

I wrote a blog post about the first case the Maryland Court of Appeals decided under Maryland's new DNA testing statute. It was a rape/murder case in which James Thompson claimed that James Owens gave him his lost knife the morning after Colleen Williar had been raped, then confessed to the crime. After both men were convicted of various crimes in connection with the death, DNA testing revealed that each was excluded as the depositor of sperm on a cytology slide taken from Williar.

Could Adnan be guilty? Sure. Could he be innocent and simply unlucky? No unluckier than any number of defendants in a criminal justice system with poor odds and long prison terms.