Adnan Syed Released From Jail: New Evidence And Suspects
Adnan Syed has been released from jail after almost two decades in prison.
His case was made famous due to the infamous podcast Serial which forged the podcasting phenomenon and broke open the ways we consume podcasts and interact with crime reporting.
Now after 23 years of Adnan Syed fighting the conviction that he murdered his former high school girlfriend Hae Min Lee, and 8 years after the release of that first pivotal Serial episode that put Adnan’s case in the spotlight, he’s now walked out of prison for the first time since he was a teenager.
This new conviction has been ruled in the “in the interests of justice and fairness” because after a year long investigation, it’s been found that prosecutors had failed to turn over evidence that might have helped Adnan’s trial.
There’s now two new suspects to be considered that might have affected the outcome of this case.
Here’s what we know.
The two alternative suspects could have teamed up or worked alone, they were known at the time of the trial and have criminal records. One of which is for attacking a woman in her car and the other a conviction of serial sexual assault.
The important finding from this new investigation found that both of the suspects had motives.
A court document revealed that one of these alternative subjects had threatened to kill or make Hae Min Lee disappear in front of another person and another trial document showed there was information which could have been seen as a motive.
But the important thing to note is that this evidence on the alternative suspects wasn’t in the defence’s files, or in any of the pleadings prosecutors produced for the defence, meaning that this missed evidence could have impacted the outcome of Adnan’s case.
Adnan is now 41 and he’s been serving a life sentence for the murder of Hae Min Lee. His case hinged on trying to figure out where Adnan was one day after school in 1999, or to be specific where he was for 21 minutes after school one day in 1999.
That’s what the podcast Serial tried to figure out, but it’s just come under fire for missing large parts of the case.
Rabia Chaudry is a good friend of Adhan who took to Twitter sharing a bunch of detailed elements that weren’t discussed in the podcast.
Like Hae Min Lee’s license plates being run by local police 6 times after her disappearance meaning officers might have spotted her car.
Let’s start w the oddities in that #Serial never discussed. First, these alerts. Hae’s car plates were run 6 times. No idea why they were run weeks after she disappeared. Did officers spot her car & run them? If so, bc of an admin glitch wouldnt have shown missing persons report. pic.twitter.com/U9DK567xlU
— rabia O’chaudry (@rabiasquared) January 13, 2018
It didn’t include the fact that police never took DNA evidence from the man who found her body, despite failing his first polygraph test, or include the results of the autopsy, which Chaudry claims contradict the official timeline.
Her body was found in an unlikely manner by a man who failed the first polygraph and was given a second one with completely different questions that he passed. The police never contacted him again or took DNA or hair samples from him. pic.twitter.com/LVIagXPWUa
— rabia O’chaudry (@rabiasquared) January 13, 2018
What the podcast did do however was bring us close to Adnan, his community, family and friends as well as those close to Hae Min Lee.
It forced us to look at the vast injustice of wrongly criminalised people in the US and the painful intricacies that orbit around the pursuit of justice.
This new investigation doesn’t prove whether Adnan is guilty or innocent, just that there’s more information to be considered.
His case rests with prosecutors who have 30 days to work out if they want to go forward with a new trial or drop the charges against Adnan.