New Evidence May Help Overturn Adnan Syed's Conviction for the Murder of Hae Min Lee

By Dustin Rowles | Serial | August 27, 2015 |

By Dustin Rowles | Serial | August 27, 2015 |

According to an attorney for Adnan Syed — the man at the center of the Serial podcast, who was convicted for the murder of Hae Min Lee — newly discovered evidence may help Syed in overturning his conviction.

As most know, Syed was granted an appeal on his case earlier this year, on the basis of ineffective assistance of counsel. He wasn’t granted a new trial, but he was granted the right to have his argument for a new trial be heard. That hearing was in May. The court has yet to decide on the appeal.

Meanwhile, Syed’s attorney is filing another motion. As with so much involved in this case, the new evidence is not “sexy” or a “smoking gun,” but Syed’s defense attorney Justin Brown has unearthed mobile phone records that not only casts doubt on Jay Wilds’ version of events (which version? who knows!) but also lends more evidence to suggest that Syed’s original trial attorney, Cristina Gutierrez, was bad at her job.

This evidence — a cover sheet from AT&T that shows that incoming call data is unreliable in determining a caller’s location — was not presented in the original trial, and the prosecution made much of their case based on incoming call data. This document — if accepted — would seemingly undermine the evidence used to present the prosecution’s version of events.

“If AT&T, the architect and operator of the cell tower network, did not think incoming calls were ‘reliable information for location,’” Brown wrote in his motion, “it is unfathomable that a Baltimore City Circuit Court judge would have allowed an expert opinion … under this method.”

via Baltimore Sun