A Baltimore circuit court judge on Thursday vacated the murder conviction of Adnan Syed, the man whose trial for the murder of high-school student Hae Min Lee in 1999 was documented in Sarah Koenig's popular "Serial" podcast.
Syed's lawyer announced that he had been granted a new trial on Twitter:
In a copy of the Maryland court order obtained by The Huffington Post, Judge Martin P. Welch agreed with the defense’s claim that the lawyer in Syed’s initial trial provided ineffective counsel when she failed to cross-examine the state of Maryland’s cell tower expert about the reliability of key evidence. The state had argued that the cell tower data accurately placed Syed at the location near where Lee’s body was found.
“I had a feeling in my heart it was going to happen. We are just very happy,” Syed's brother Yusuf told the Baltimore Sun. “It’s not only a win for us but a win for a lot of people who’re stuck in the system because it opened a lot of people’s eyes about the justice system.”
While “Serial” drew massive attention to Syed’s case — it was the fastest podcast to reach 5 million downloads and streams in the Apple Store — it was the unofficial spinoff “Undisclosed” that unearthed crucial new evidence. “Undisclosed,” created by Syed family friend Rabia Chaudry, discovered a fax cover sheet from AT&T that noted the unreliability of cell tower information due to a technical glitch.
“Outgoing calls only are reliable for location status. Any incoming calls will NOT be considered reliable information for location,” the sheet read. Syed's original lawyer, Cristina Gutierrez, did not introduce the cover sheet at trial.
Kevin Sali, a criminal defense attorney in Portland, Oregon, who has followed the Syed case, noted that ineffective counsel claims are typically “very hard to win.”
“You basically have to show two things: That your lawyer’s performance fell below the constitutional minimum standard -- not that they did a bad job or could have done better. What makes that difficult is that a lot of things a lawyer will do or not do are considered judgement calls," Sali said. "You also have to show that if your lawyer had done a constitutionally competent job, the result of the case would have been different."
Thursday's ruling means Syed’s claim satisfied both prongs: the judge believed that Gutierrez was "constitutionally ineffective," and that cross-examining the witness may have affected the outcome.
This is a developing story and will be updated as more information becomes available.
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