The third season of the popular “Serial” podcast will take on the criminal justice system through episodes that examine everyday court cases in Cleveland when it launches later this month.

In a trailer on the podcast’s website, host Sarah Koenig said ever since the first season of “Serial,” which revisited a Woodlawn High School student’s murder and the conviction of her former boyfriend, people have asked her what that case says about the criminal justice system.

The new season promises to take listeners inside a Cleveland criminal courthouse.

Koenig, a Baltimore Sun alum, teases listeners with a summary of one of the cases she witnessed, in which a man was facing decades of jail for an alleged mugging.

“Inside this regular prosecution I’d seen a litany of things that shouldn’t be allowed,” Koenig said. “It was like a checklist of almost all the stuff reformers complain about: extra charges loaded onto a case, pressure to plead, shabby police work, a police officer possibly lying on the stand, 11th-hour evidence shoehorned into a trial, overworked attorneys, dozing jurors ... and finally an outsized prison sentence. But no one was stomping their feet too hard about any of that.”

The first episode drops Sept. 20.

— Sarah Meehan