Following a year-long investigation conducted alongside his defence team, the state’s attorney for Baltimore City says that new evidence has emerged, including the possible involvement of two alternative suspects.
In the court filing, prosecutors say there is evidence that two suspects may have been involved, either together or separately.
Prosecutors state that the suspects, who are not named in the court papers, were known to investigators during the first probe but were not properly ruled out.
My jaded reaction was “ugh, does this mean they’re going to do another season?”
I saw the headline elsewhere and I have to say I’m a tad confused. In my experience it’s not prosecutors who are seeking to overturn convictions, and especially not when they think that other suspects “may” have been involved.
After the Maryland Supreme Court overturned the lower court’s order for a new trial back in 2018, that was it for Syed’s appeals.
But his new lawyer (and head of Maryland’s branch of the Innocence Project) and supporters got the attention of the reform-minded new state’s attorney for Baltimore, who turned it over to the fairly newly established Sentencing Review Board. And in their investigation, they did find Brady violations had occurred, including information withheld that may have implicated other suspects. And so the motion to vacate comes from that prosecutor’s office.
It’s a very pleasing result to me. I’m reasonably sure Syed is innocent based on the information that’s been presented on Serial and subsequent coverage, but even if the man is a stone-cold murderer that trial was a travesty and a new one fully justified.
Conviction to be vacated per judge!
Here’s a gift link:
Technically, if they want to, they can re-try him.
Practically…unless they find a video tape of him at age 17 saying “I killed her, and here’s video footage of me doing it” they are very unlikely to.
Reading through the motion that the prosecutor’s office filed to vacate the conviction, there’s some fascinating details in there – especially for anyone who’s listened to the Undisclosed podcast or watched The Case against Adnan Syed on HBO. Like, you can tell (sorta) one of the uninvestigated suspects that they’re referring to in the motion.
I only ever listened to the original Podcast. I know there was a separate podcast produced by Rabia directly - I guess that’s Undisclosed? is it worth listening to? Or the HBO show?
I bounced off Undisclosed hard, but others loved it. It’s worth at least checking out an episode or two to see where you land.
Undisclosed had a lot of interesting things to say, but did not have an experienced team of This American Life producers working on it.
Undisclosed is a little bit rough at first, but it gets better as it goes.
But it’s worth noting: “Serial” is a podcast about telling interesting stories in an audio documentary format.
Undisclosed (the Adnan season) is about re-examining the case from a lawyerly and investigative standpoint, and less about storytelling. It has a goal: get evidence out there, get Adnan freed.
What’s interesting to me: when I first listened to Undisclosed years ago, I thought they brought up some really great points. But I was also SUPER aware of the show’s point-of-view. They make no bones about it and are up front with it, but the whole time I was listening I was thinking “Yes, but if this is all true, why is this guy still in jail?”
But now the CRAZY thing is: if you read the motion for vacating the charges against Adnan filed by the prosecutor’s office, it’s almost like a crib notes of all the stuff brought up by Undisclosed.
I mean in hindsight: that podcast was on the nose more than I ever suspected.
And the HBO documentary is very, very good.
Man. If he didn’t do it, he’s lost more than half of his life (so far) to a wrongful conviction. That’s horrific.
Are you familiar with the US justice system?
No, I’m pretty unfamiliar with most things about American politics, so thanks!
The point you missed: Undisclosed is very much from a single point-of-view, and up until the motion to vacate, it was very fair (and probably prudent) to wonder if the one-sidedness of the podcast was because that’s just how fully screwed up Baltimore was/is (even compared to other localities in the US), or if there was a lot of the story being conveniently left out because it didn’t fit the “Free Adnan” narrative.
And the further point: it was apparently much more the former than the latter.
I remember listening to Undisclosed and thinking “things can’t possibly be this screwed up.” I simply assumed that, since it was clearly coming from the perspective that Syed was innocent, they were interpreting every single ambiguity in the most favorable light (and leaving the unfavorable things out entirely). It just didn’t seem possible that the legal system could be that screwed up.
Subsequent events (Freddy Gray, Gun Trace Task Force, etc.) have shown that things were even more screwed up than Undisclosed posited. Who would have thought we’d look back on the fictional Baltimore of The Wire and say “I wish reality was only that screwed up…”
The thing about The Wire is that while it is fictional and dramatized, it is heavily rooted in what was actually happening in Baltimore at the time.
And the thing about Adnan Syed’s case is that once you’re convicted a lot of stuff that might have mattered at the trial does not matter to appeal attempts and the like. Because they’re looking at different things and care about different standards. Furthermore, there is an automatic bias towards assuming the original conviction was correct - both from laypeople like us, and from the system. Because we want the system to be working.