Conviction of Adnan Syed in ‘Serial’ Podcast Case is Overturned, Judge Orders Him Released

Baltimore prosecutors asked a Maryland magistrate to vacate the judgment Monday afternoon in the case of Adnan Syed, whose decades-old murder conviction garnered renewed interest after it was featured on the “Serial” podcast in 2014.

via: NBC News

City Circuit Court Judge Melissa Phinn said prosecutors made a compelling argument that Syed’s convicted was flawed.

Trial prosecutors did not properly turn over evidence to defense lawyers that could have helped them show someone else killed Lee, Phinn said. And new evidence uncovered since the trial would have added “substantial and significant probability that the result would have been different.”

Phinn vacated murder, kidnapping, robbery and false imprisonment against Syed. The judge ordered him released without bail.

Moments before the ruling, prosecutor Becky Feldman said that “justice and fairness” calls for Syed’s convictions to be tossed.

“The state has lost confidence in the integrity of this convection and believe that it is in the interest of justice and fairness that his convictions be vacated,” Feldman said.

“It is our promise that we will do everything we can to bring justice to the Lee family. That means continuing to utilize all available resources to bring a suspect or suspects to justice and hold them accountable.”

Syed, who has a full beard, appeared in court wearing a long-sleeve white dress shirt, dark tie and traditional Muslim skull cap.

Maryland prosecutors last week asked that Syed’s conviction be vacated and a new trial be granted, stunning the victim’s family.

Lee’s brother, Young Lee, wept throughout his virtual court appearance, wondering how this turn of events unfolded.

“I’ve been living with this for like 20-plus years and every day when I think it’s over, whenever I think it’s over or it’s ended, it always comes back,” he told the court via Zoom. “And it’s not just me, it’s killing me and and it’s killing my mother.”

Steve Kelly, a lawyer for Lee’s family asked Phinn to delay Monday’s proceedings by seven days so the victim’s brother could attend and address the court.

The family wasn’t given enough time and didn’t have an attorney to make a decision about appearing in court, according to Kelly.

“To suggest that the State’s Attorney’s Office has provided adequate notice under these circumstances is outrageous,” Kelly told the court. “My client is not a lawyer and was not counseled by an attorney as to his rights and to act accordingly.”

But Phinn said the family, represented by Lee’s brother in California, could easily jump on a Zoom to address the court.

She ordered a 30-minute delay for the brother to get to computer so he could dial into the hearing.

“I was kind of blindsided,” Lee told the court. “I always thought the state was on my side, but out of nowhere I hear that there’s a motion to vacate judgment and I thought, honestly, I felt betrayed.”

Lee was 18 when she was killed in 1999 and her body found buried in Baltimore’s Leakin Park.

After Syed, now 42, was sentenced to life behind bars in 2000, his case gained national notoriety from the 2014 podcast “Serial.”

Prosecutors had relied on cellphone records that seemed to show Syed was in the vicinity of the park where Lee’s body was found. But they now say they question “unreliable cellphone tower data” used against Syed at trial, and want to look at “two alternative suspects.”

“These suspects were known persons at the time of the investigation of the case and not properly ruled out,” according to last week’s filing by prosecutors.

Syed’s legal team has insisted that the cellphone data used against him was unreliable because carrier AT&T had said it only determined where outgoing calls were coming from, not incoming calls. The cellular evidence used at trial against Syed centered on his phone receiving incoming calls, meaning his general location around the time of Lee’s disappearance could not be verified.

Syed’s defense has also long questioned a key account by the couple’s schoolmate, Jay Wilds, who testified that he was with Syed when he buried her body at the park.