A Maryland court granted a new trial to and vacated the murder conviction of Adnan Syed, a Maryland man whose story gained fame on the podcast “Serial.”
The Maryland Court of Special Appeals ruled Thursday that Syed received ineffective assistance of counsel in the original murder trial. The court vacated Syed’s murder conviction, as well as other convictions related to the murder of his girlfriend, Hae Min Lee.
Ayed, then 17, was convicted of killing Lee in 1999 and burying her body in a park in northwest Baltimore.
Syed’s case was highlighted by the podcast “Serial,” which was released in 2014 and chronicled the crime as well as Syed’s trial. The podcast raised doubts as to whether Syed had received a fair trial.
Syed filed a petition for post-conviction relief in 2010 that raised claims of ineffective assistance of trial counsel, sentencing counsel, and appellate counsel, but his request was denied.
It had been revealed Syed’s original lawyer, the late Cristina Gutierrez, failed to contact a key witness in the case, Asia McClain, who would’ve been able to provide an alibi for Syed.
A lower court then granted Syed a new trial in 2016, but Maryland prosecutors then appealed that decision to the Maryland Court of Special Appeals.
The new trial will be before the Circuit Court for Baltimore City.
“Trial counsel’s deficient performance prejudiced Syed’s defense, because, but for trial counsel’s failure to investigate, there is a reasonable probability that McClain’s alibi testimony would have raised a reasonable doubt in the mind of at least one juror about Syed’s involvement [in] Hae’s murder, and thus, ‘the result of the proceedings would have been different,’” Chief Judge Patrick Woodward wrote.
