ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) — Maryland’s highest court denied a new trial Friday for a man whose murder conviction was chronicled in the hit podcast “Serial.”
In a 4-3 opinion, the Court of Appeals agreed with a lower court that Adnan Syed’s legal counsel was deficient in failing to investigate an alibi witness, but it disagreed that the deficiency prejudiced the case. The court said Syed waived his ineffective counsel claim.
The court reversed a Court of Special Appeals’ judgment, sending the case back to that court with directions to reverse a Baltimore Circuit Court judgment granting a new trial.
Syed is serving a life sentence after he was convicted in 2000 of strangling 17-year-old Hae Min Lee and burying her body in a Baltimore park. More than a decade later, the popular “Serial” podcast brought Syed’s long-running case to millions of listeners with its debut 2014 season. The show revealed little-known evidence and attracted millions of listeners, shattering podcast-streaming and downloading records.
In 2016, a lower court ordered a retrial for Syed on grounds that his attorney, Cristina Gutierrez, who died in 2004, didn’t contact an alibi witness and provided ineffective counsel. The state appealed. The special appeals court upheld the lower court’s ruling last year and the state appealed that decision, too.
Syed’s attorney Justin Brown said in a statement that they are “devastated” by the decision “but we will not give up on Adnan Syed.”
“Our criminal justice system is desperately in need of reform. The obstacles to getting a new trial are simply too great,” Brown said. “There was a credible alibi witness who was with Adnan at the precise time of the murder and now the Court of Appeals has said that witness would not have affected the outcome of the proceeding. We think just the opposite is true. From the perspective of the defendant, there is no stronger evidence than an alibi witness.”
I have not read the decision, but for the court to say that the lawyer’s failure did not prejudice Syed at the trial, the court should have to find that no reasonable juror could have been swayed if the lawyer had done his job right and produced the alibi witness. That’s a very heavy lift.
This seems wrong to me. Based on the evidence I don’t think he should have ever been convicted “beyond a reasonable doubt” and I tend to think he was probably innocent. But regardless, on the adequate representation issue, his lawyer was hiding cancer and in the midst of a big mental demise, and never reached out to an alibi witness who to this day (on the podcast) insists that she was with him when the murder supposedly occurred. Just put it all together and give the man a new trial. You shouldn’t spend your life locked up for a murder that can’t be proven against you just because you “waived” the argument or whatever technical shit.
I wasn’t convinced of his innocence but it was very clear that his lawyer wasn’t functioning well.
The Maryland Court of Appeals provides yet another illustration of the distinction between law and justice in this the best of all possible nations.
Unfortunately, the American justice system prioritizes the rights of prosecutors and police not to have to say “we made a mistake” over the rights of an innocent person to have to spend the rest of their life in prison.
I forget the name of the case but Scalia’s opinion summed up well a deep conservative thread. That is a court or juries decision in a fair trial is correct, and final. Actual guilt or innocence has nothing to do with it. When it serves their purpose then courts are simply a process and justice is served by following process. The result right or wrong is justice.
I am totally agnostic on this case and know nothing about it. It appears to be a question of if the case was fairly presented. This question is almost always decided by the wealth and class of the defendant.