The Daily - Why Adnan Syed Was Released From Prison

Episode Date: September 20, 2022

Adnan Syed was accused of the 1999 killing of his classmate and ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee, whose body was found buried in a car park in Baltimore.He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison but has proclaimed his innocence for the last 23 years.Mr. Syed was the subject of the first season of the podcast “Serial,” which painstakingly examined his case and the evidence against him.Yesterday, his conviction was overturned. On today’s episode, the “Serial” team looks at how this happened. Guest: Sarah Koenig, the host and executive producer of the “Serial” podcast.Background reading: Mr. Syed had been serving a life sentence for the 1999 murder of his high school classmate Hae Min Lee. Here is the timeline of his legal journey.A Baltimore City Circuit Court judge vacated Mr. Syed’s conviction “in the interests of justice and fairness.”For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Yesterday, Adnan Syed was released from prison. You know his story. It was the subject of the first season of the podcast Serial, which painstakingly examined his case and the evidence used against him. Syed was accused of killing his classmate and ex-girlfriend, Haymin Lee, whose body was found buried in a park in Baltimore.

He was convicted and sentenced to life, but has proclaimed his innocence for the last 23 years. It was a stunning development, and my colleague, serial host Sarah Koenig, was in court watching it unfold and tells the story of why it happened. It's Tuesday, September 20th. This is a Global Tell Link prepaid call from... An inmate at a Maryland correctional facility. This call will be recorded and monitored. There is a major development in a case intimately explored in the hit podcast... A stunning reversal.

Baltimore State's attorney presenting new evidence of two other possible suspects. And what this all means is that after decades behind bars, Adnan could be got out of prison yesterday. It was extraordinary, the whole thing. Here's his attorney, Erica Suter. Today, my friend and client Adnan Syed walks free for the first time in 23 years. On Wednesday of last week, city prosecutors filed a motion saying they could no longer stand behind the murder case they built against Adnan.

They were asking a judge to vacate the conviction. Five days later, Adnan was out. On home detention for now, but out. Home. Good afternoon. God is good. Since the inception of my administration... Marilyn Mosby, Baltimore State's attorney, started to give a statement to the dozens of TV cameras and microphones massed on the sidewalk outside the courthouse. The public must know that the justice, the justice. But she couldn't compete with the mayhem when Adnan finally walked out. From the people who've been arguing for his release, some of them for decades, the pent-up strain of years' worth of rage and frustration

suddenly loosed on the sidewalk, spilling onto Calvert Street. How do you feel, man? Anand didn't say a word, just kept his cool while sheriff's deputies hurried him through the scrum and into a white van. Anand and I have talked on and off over the years. More recently, it seemed like he was trying to tamp down his hopes, not get ahead of himself. A couple of his old attorneys, though,

the guys who tried to get him out on bail when he was 17, I caught them out on the sidewalk, hugging. I don't know if I would have been able to hack it if she said so. I don't know. I was in the courtroom for the hearing. More than 100 people, at times shockingly quiet, as if no one was breathing. At the beginning, Young Lee, the brother of Hayman Lee, whose murder was about to be unsolved, spoke via Zoom directly to Judge Melissa Finn.

Young Lee tried to keep it together, but he couldn't. When I think it's over, he said, it always comes back. A real-life living nightmare for 20-plus years. But he also told the judge he believes in the justice system. He's not against a new investigation. He said to Judge Finn, make the right decision. Then the prosecutor read the highlights of her motion into the record. Adnan's lawyer made a brief statement.

And within about 40 minutes, the judge was ready with her decision. Then the prosecutor read the highlights of her motion into the record. Adnan's lawyer made a brief statement. And within about 40 minutes, the judge was ready with her decision. On this 19th day of September 2022, she said, in the interests of justice, the motion to vacate is hereby granted. You might be asking, what on earth happened? I've spent the last few days trying to understand it myself. Wherefore this motion to vacate that burst like a firework out of the prosecutor's office? The very same office that asked the jury in 1999 to, quote, come back with a guilty finding for first-degree premeditated murder by the defendant, Adnan Syed.

The prosecutors today are not saying Adnan is innocent. They stopped short of exonerating him. Instead, they're saying that back in 1999, we didn't investigate this case thoroughly enough. We relied on evidence we shouldn't have, and we broke the rules when we prosecuted. This wasn't an honest conviction. According to the prosecutor's office, they didn't set out to pick apart Adnan's case, their own case, mind you. They say it just kind of crumbled once they took a hard look. I know.

If you've heard season one of Serial, you know how I got there. Here's how they got there. Almost a year ago, a new law took effect in Maryland, the Juvenile Restoration Act. One of the things the law says is that if you've served at least 20 years in prison for a crime you committed when you were a juvenile, you can ask the court to reduce your sentence, maybe even let you out. So the day after this new law comes into effect, on October 2nd, 2021, Adnan's current attorney, Erica Souter, delivers his case over to the Baltimore City State's attorney's office for them to look at. Because, if you remember, Adnan was only 17 when he was arrested for killing Hayman Lee, his classmate and former girlfriend. This request goes to Becky Feldman, chief of the sentencing review unit for the

prosecutor's office. One of the factors she has to weigh in deciding whether to support a sentence reduction under this new law is the facts of the crime. So Becky Feldman starts reading, and pretty soon she's bothered. Something isn't right with the case. She's having a hard time answering what should be a simple question. What's Adnan Syed's level of culpability in this crime? Becky Feldman is pretty new to the prosecutor's office, pretty new to being a prosecutor. She'd been high up at the public defender's office for years. Her sense of alarm was cultivated on the defense side. A sentence review isn't supposed to be a reinvestigation of a case, but that's what starts rolling.

By March, Becky's office, joined by Adnan's lawyer, asks a judge to order new high-tech DNA testing. That takes a while to work through the system. So while they wait, Becky and Erica Suter work together, pulling threads. Becky's office consults cell phone experts, a polygraph expert. She's all up inside Google Maps and land records. The state's massive case file is over at the attorney general's office a few blocks away. Becky starts hoofing it over there in June. The AG's office is like, 17 boxes of case materials, here's a copy machine, knock yourself out.

She copies a bunch of stuff from the first seven boxes, takes the papers back to her office to read. And that's when she discovers some handwritten notes. They're messy, hard to make out. But once she deciphers the writing, she realizes these notes are about a potential alternate suspect in the case. She calls up Erica Suter, who tells her, yeah, we've never seen these notes before. They're both shocked. Once the DNA results came back in mid-August,

with nothing really conclusive or useful, they took stock of everything they'd learned. The result was a disturbing bouquet of problems, whose cumulative effect gave the state, quote, overwhelming cause for concern. Under the circumstances, they couldn't justify holding a nun in prison anymore. So Becky Feldman wrote a motion to the court, a motion to vacate. The motion to vacate does not tell us a new story of the crime, doesn't lay out an alternate theory of who killed Hayman Lee.

Instead, the motion lays out how the system malfunctioned back then, and how little we know now. The headline of the state's motion is that they've developed more evidence about two people who might have been involved in the crime, but whom they say weren't properly ruled out as suspects. They don't name these people, they just call them the suspect or the suspects, because they say the investigation is ongoing. They might have been involved together or separately, they don't know, but both were known to detectives at the time. The first thing and worst thing they list about these possible suspects, those handwritten notes Becky Feldman found in the state's trial boxes.

They appear to be written by a prosecutor, memorializing two different phone calls from different people who called the calls came in several months apart and before Adnan was tried. The gist of the information from both calls is that a guy the state had more or less overlooked had a motive to kill Heyman Lee, that this person was heard saying that he was upset with her and that he would, quote, make her disappear. He would kill her, unquote. In court yesterday, Becky said the state had looked into this individual and found the information in those handwritten notes to be credible, that this suspect had the, quote, motive, opportunity, and means to commit the crime. Whether he did or he didn't, though, legally speaking, this would be a major breach. If they failed to turn over evidence like this to the defense,

that's known as a Brady violation. And that's what so alarms Becky Feldman, that it looks like Adnan's lawyers never knew about these calls. That alone could be cause to overturn Adnan's conviction. So that's the biggest problem the motion explains, this Brady violation regarding one of the two alternate suspects the prosecutors are not naming. And the motion says they've also got other new information about these two suspects. One of them had a connection to the location where

Heyman Lee's car was found after she disappeared. One or both of them have relevant criminal histories, mostly crimes committed after Adnan's trial, one of them for a series of sexual assaults. I know who these suspects are. One of them was investigated at the time, submitted to a couple of polygraphs. The other was investigated also, but not with much vigor as far as I can tell.

He's now in prison for sexual assault. But no one has charged either of these guys in connection with Hayman Lee's murder, so I'm not going to name them either. That's all the new information they found about the case. But, the motion continues, they also looked at the old information. And now they're saying they've lost faith in that too. They don't trust the state's main evidence at trial, the testimony of their star witness, Jay Wilds, and the cell phone records. They don't hold up separately. They don't hold up together.

If you've listened to our show, you probably remember all this. Jay was a friend of Adnan's who told the cops that Adnan said he was going to kill Hay and that after he did it, he showed Jay her body in the trunk of a car and then coerced Jay into helping bury her in a wooded city park. trunk of a car, and then coerced Jay into helping bury her in a wooded city park. The motion explains, as many people have before, that the details of Jay's story kept changing. Becky Feldman points to one glaring example, the location where Jay says Adnan first showed him Hay's body. In his first taped interview with the detectives, Jay tells them he met up with Adnan somewhere along Edmondson Avenue, and that's when he sees Hay's body in the trunk.

I went to pick him up from off of Edmondson Avenue at a strip, and he popped the trunk open. Let's say on Edmondson Avenue off of the strip. Do you recall any cross streets on Edmondson Avenue where you go to meet him? I don't know him by name, but I can tell him to you by sight. A couple weeks later, Jay tells the cops he met up with Adnan and saw Hay's body in a different spot. And while en route to your house, you received a phone call from Adnan. Yes.

On his cell phone. Yes. Which is in your possession. Yes. And the conversation was what? That bitch is dead. Come and get me. I'm at that spot. And Jay's story has gotten even more confusing in the years since the trial. The motion notes that Jay told a reporter, not me, back in 2014,

that he'd been out in front of his grandmother's house when a nun came by and popped the trunk. At the trial, prosecutors kept saying to the jury, we know he's not the greatest witness. I do remember that when we first heard his testimony, that we were all skeptical, like, who is this guy and where did he come from? That's a juror named Lisa Flynn. The prosecutors were telling the jury, don't worry, you don't have to rely on his testimony alone,

because what he's saying is corroborated by the cell phone records. Cell phone evidence was crucial to the state's case. It underpinned Jay's testimony about what happened that night, where they went, whom they spoke to. It glued together the timeline. The cell phone evidence helped clear up the shagginess of Jay's story. It was after hearing the other testimony, and seeing the records and, like, the cell phone records, you know, knowing that, okay, so even if he had lied, testimony proved that he was at this place at this time. But Becky Feldman wrote in last week's motion that the cell phone evidence at trial, it was unreliable.

Adnan's defense team has been saying this for years, but the state only recently talked to three experts about what the cell records actually show and don't show. And the experts all agreed you can't use the incoming call records to back up Jay's narrative. Doesn't work like that for a host of reasons I won't bore you with. We didn't get to the bottom of this incoming call problem back when we were reporting this story. call problem back when we were reporting this story. At the end of the motion, Becky Feldman tacked on a, by the way, final section about one of the two main detectives on the case, Bill Ritz. He was accused of misconduct in another murder case that went to trial the same year Adnan did. In that case, Detective Ritz was accused of manipulating evidence, fabricating evidence, not disclosing exculpatory evidence, not following up on evidence that had pointed to a different suspect.

In 2016, the guy convicted in that case was exonerated. Ritz was one of the two detectives who repeatedly interviewed Jay Wilds. So that's the bulk of the state's motion to vacate. So that's the bulk of the state's motion to vacate. New information about two potential suspects, important evidence withheld from the defense, renewed suspicion of Jay's story, loss of confidence in the cell phone evidence.

And while the Brady violation alone is enough for the state to cry uncle, all of it together, well, yes, overwhelming cause for concern. Anand's case was a mess, is a mess. That's pretty much where we were when we stopped reporting in 2014. Baltimore City Police have told the prosecutor's office they're going to put someone back on the case. Someone will try to talk to the two suspects Becky identified in the motion. I have zero predictions about what could come of that. But I do know that the chances of the state ever trying to prosecute Adnan again

are remote at best. When Rabia Chowdhury first came to me about this case, I hadn't heard of it. No other journalists were looking at it. Most of the reporting I did was to try to find out, obviously, who killed this young woman, but also, if everyone's doing their job right, how does a kid get convicted on evidence this shaky? In the years since our story first aired, Rabia and others have pushed to find out more.

Now here come city prosecutors, and they're going even further. And the picture that's emerged is this. Adnan's case contains just about every chronic problem our system can cough up. Police using questionable interview methods. Prosecutors keeping crucial evidence from the defense. Slightly junky science. Extreme prison sentences. Juveniles treated as adults.

How grindingly difficult it is to get your case back in court once you've been convicted. The Baltimore courtroom where Adnan's hearing was held is an old-school architectural gem. You sit there hoping the massive chandelier is well secured. The soaring ceilings are meant to inspire soaring thoughts. About justice, presumably, and fairness. Yesterday, there was a lot of talk about fairness. But most of what the state put in that motion to vacate, all the actual evidence, was either known or knowable to cops and prosecutors back in 1999.

So even on a day when the government publicly recognizes its own mistakes, it's hard to feel cheered about a triumph of fairness. Because we've built a system that takes more than 20 years to self-correct. And that's just this one case. Thank you. Here's what else you need to know today. After knocking out the electricity in Puerto Rico, Hurricane Fiona subjected the island to unrelenting rain and terrifying flash floods on Monday. Over the past

two days, more than 30 inches of rain have fallen in some parts of Puerto Rico, requiring the emergency rescue of about 1,000 people. And. Queen Elizabeth II was laid to rest on Monday after a majestic state funeral that drew tens of millions of Britons together in a vast expression of grief and gratitude. Her late majesty famously declared on a 21st birthday broadcast that her whole life would be dedicated to serving the nation and Commonwealth. Rarely has such a promise been so well kept. After a eulogy from the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Queen's coffin was lowered into the royal vault next to her late husband, Prince Philip, inside a chapel at Windsor Castle.

Moments later, a lone bagpiper paid tribute to the queen. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Bilboro. See you tomorrow.