A judge in Maryland has granted a retrial to Adnan Syed, who was convicted of murdering his girlfriend Hae Min Lee in 1999, and whose trial was the subject of the insanely popular podcast Serial.
WE WON A NEW TRIAL FOR ADNAN SYED!!! #FreeAdnan
— Justin Brown (@CJBrownLaw) June 30, 2016
He has served 16 years of a life sentence, and has professed his innocence even as he exhausted all other avenues of appeal. It’s pretty obvious that Serial was integral in getting a retrial, after approximately 500 billion people listened to it an pored over every aspect of the case.
Serial won a Peabody Award for illuminating flaws in the American criminal justice system – because regardless of whether or not you reckon Syed did it, there was a whole lotta dodgy going on around the case.
The retrial was granted based on the testimony of an AT&T engineer, Abraham Waranowitz, who says that he would not have testified on cellphone location data had he been shown a disclaimer about cell tower data prior to the trial. But the big motivator for a retrial was the testimony of Asia McClain, the witness who claims she was chatting with Syed in a library when the murder allegedly happened.
Judge C. Justin Brown confirmed in a press conference that the retrial probably would not have happened without Serial, which strikes me as the understatement of the century.
Source: NY Times.
Photo: Getty Images.