National Post (National Edition)
Returning to the scene
THE CASE AGAINST ADNAN SYED REVISITS THE CRIME SERIAL MADE FAMOUS
Hae. Adnan. Jay. For months beginning in late 2014, much of North America was on firstname basis with the central figures in Season 1 of Serial, the true-crime podcast hosted by Sarah Koenig that became a pop culture obsession. Downloaded more than 100 million times, the series helped to bring podcasting into the mainstream and, along with TV series like The Jinx and Making a Murderer, kick-started a wave of serialized true-crime whodunits that shows no signs of ebbing.
Revelations in Serial also helped advance the real-life case itself: the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee, a Baltimore County high school senior, for which her ex-boyfriend Adnan Syed was convicted. The Case Against Adnan Syed, a four-part documentary series that debuted Sunday night on HBO (available on Crave), revisits that case, which has evolved considerably in the past several years.
If you don’t remember who Asia Mcclain is, or why she is important, you probably aren’t alone — the details of this case were fuzzy from the start. Here’s a refresher on the basics, along with updates on what has happened since Serial.
THE CRIME
On Jan. 13, 1999, Hae Min Lee left Woodlawn High School and never came home. About a month later, her body was found partially buried in nearby Leakin Park, at Baltimore’s western edge. The cause of death was strangulation. A police investigation led to Lee’s ex-boyfriend and classmate Adnan Syed. Syed pleaded not guilty and was convicted in 2000 of first-degree murder and kidnapping. He was sentenced to life in prison and has maintained his innocence ever since.
THE BACKGROUND
Lee and Syed came from conser vative immigrant families — Lee Korean, Syed Pakistani — and felt compelled to keep their romance a secret. Not long before Lee disappeared, she had broken up with Syed and begun dating a co-worker named Don. Part of what seems to have driven her and Syed apart was her frustration over not being able to bring their relationship into the open.
Lee and Syed were wellliked at school. Lee played lacrosse and field hockey and was described by a teacher as “one of those rare people you meet in life who is always happy, always joyful and full of love,” The Baltimore Sun reported. Syed played on the football team and was, by most accounts, a happy, charismatic young man who got excellent grades. He talked in Serial of smoking weed, but there was no indication he was into anything more extreme.
THE BASICS OF THE PROSECUTION
Prosecutors relied heavily on a few main pieces of evidence, none of it physical. The most important was testimony by a friend of Adnan’s named Jay Wilds, who told police he had helped Syed to bury Lee’s body after Syed confessed to killing her, on Jan. 13. According to Wilds’ court testimony, Syed had told him earlier that day that he intended to kill Lee. Wilds then borrowed Syed’s car for the day.
Later, Wilds said, Syed called him and asked to meet in a Best Buy parking lot. Wilds said that Syed had showed up driving Lee’s car, with her body in the trunk, asking for help. They eventually abandoned Lee’s car in a residential lot, he said.
Prosecutors presented cellphone tower records, which they said helped confirm Wilds’ final version of events. (His testimony had changed on several important points over time.) Another witness, Jennifer Pusateri, also helped confirm parts of Wilds’ testimony; she told the court that Wilds told her that Syed had shown him Lee’s body and had confessed to the murder.
THE POTENTIAL HOLES
Perhaps the biggest revelation in Serial was the existence of an alibi witness for Syed, a young woman named Asia Mcclain, who has said she was with him at the Woodlawn Public Library. If true, it would match Syed’s version of events. She was never called to testify.
Wilds gave two recorded police interviews and testimony in court. Inconsistencies on several major details have been pointed out among the three accounts. The credibility of the cellphone records — their technical reliability and their harmony with the prosecution’s timeline — has also been called into question.
Physical evidence gathered in 1999 was never tested for Syed’s DNA. The reasons for that aren’t clear, but Syed has reportedly said that his lawyer, Maria Cristina Gutierrez, never told him about the evidence. She was later disbarred by consent, in 2001, after a series of client complaints emerged. At the time of her disbarment, she told The Baltimore Sun she had been struggling with multiple sclerosis. She died in 2004.
The Season 1 finale of Serial revealed the Innocence Project Clinic at the University of Virginia Law School was looking at the case and hoped to persuade the courts to finally initiate DNA tests on the physical evidence.
WHAT HAS HAPPENED SINCE?
By March 2018, Serial had been downloaded more than 175 million times. Koenig’s investigations had offered no clear opinion on Syed’s guilt, but they had brought to light the potential holes in the prosecution’s case and intensified public pressure to re-examine it. For many Serial listeners, the revelations made Syed something of a cause célèbre. (The court has said that public pressure was not a factor in its decision.)
That month, an appeals court vacated Syed’s conviction, recommending a new trial. The judges cited ineffective legal counsel by Gutierrez for, among other things, failing to call McClain, the potential alibi witness. Mcclain stated in an affidavit that she had sent Syed two letters after his arrest, which Syed has said prompted him to ask Gutierrez to contact her. Gutierrez later told him she had, and that nothing had come of it. That entire statement was later discovered to be untrue.
In June, a judge granted Syed a new trial, specifically citing the unreliability of the cellphone evidence. But Friday afternoon, the Maryland Court of Appeals reversed the lower appellate court’s decision and reinstated Syed’s conviction. In its opinion, the panel agreed that Syed’s counsel had been “deficient” but did not believe it had resulted in prejudice, “given the totality of the evidence against” Syed.
HBO has said that its new series, directed by Amy Berg, contains “new discoveries as well as groundbreaking revelations that challenge the state’s case.”
Lee’s family has always maintained that Syed’s conviction was just.
“We do not speak as often or as loudly as those who support Adnan Syed, but we care just as much about this case,” the Lee family said in a statement shortly after the new trial was granted. “We continue to grieve. We continue to believe justice was done when Mr. Syed was convicted of killing Hae.”