Deep Dive
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This is a Global Telelink prepaid call from Adnan Sayed.
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 released from prison. Adnan Syed 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.
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... 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. 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 they 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.
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. It 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 state's attorney's office to give information about the same person. The notes aren't dated, but as best as Becky can tell, 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 Hayman 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 the 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 Heyman 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. 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 pops the trunk open. I'm saying, on Edmondson Avenue off of the strip. Do you recall any crossbreeds on Edmondson Avenue where you get remunerated? 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 on his cell phone, which is in your possession. 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 then seeing the records and, like, the cell phone records, um...
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. 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. 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. This episode was produced by Julie Snyder, Dana Chivas, and me. Editing by Dana and Julie. Fact-checking by Ben Phelan. Mixing by Mike Comete. Original score by Mark Phillips and Nick Thorburn. Our digital editor is Julie Whitaker. Website producer is Bex Orris. Ended Shubu is our supervising producer. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Ben Calhoun, Nina Lassam, and Jeffrey Miranda.
Serial is produced by Serial Productions and The New York Times. The best relationships are the ones where people feel comfortable being themselves. They're with people who really see someone for who they are. Someone who really gets them. So why not use a dating app that is designed to do specifically that? eHarmony helps you find someone you can be yourself with. Find someone you can be yourself with. Get who gets you on eHarmony.