Adnan Syed Of ‘Serial’ Has Been Granted A Retrial After 16 Years In Prison

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.

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.

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