![]() ![]() The 12-episode podcast, which details the case and Koenig’s attempts to investigate it, shattered records: Serial became the first podcast to reach five million downloads and the first to win a Peabody Award. Syed was convicted in 1999 of murdering his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, in Baltimore, but Chaudry believed that Syed was innocent and that his attorney had mishandled the case. Producer Sarah Koenig conceived of the show after she was approached by the attorney Rabia Chaudry, who asked Koenig to investigate the case of her friend, Adnan Syed. ![]() That failure alone could be grounds to overturn Syed's conviction, Koenig said.The podcast Serial, a spinoff of the long-running radio program This American Life, debuts on October 3, 2014, and quickly becomes a smash hit. In the prosecutors' motion to vacate Syed's conviction, Feldman said there was evidence that two potential alternative suspects weren't properly ruled out in 1999, including a prosecutor's handwritten notes about one of the suspects, which were never disclosed to Syed's lawyers. The former public defender was "bothered" by aspects of the prosecution and began reinvestigating the case in partnership with Syed's legal team, Koenig said. That request prompted a review of Syed's file by Becky Feldman, chief of the state's attorney's office sentencing review unit. Syed's lawyers filed their request the day after the law took effect in October. This wasn't an honest conviction."' Sentence review prompted fresh investigationĪs Koenig laid out in Tuesday's episode, under a new Maryland law that came into effect last year, convicts who had served at least 20 years for a crime committed as a juvenile could ask for a sentence reduction, or even a release from prison. We relied on evidence we shouldn't have, and we broke the rules when we prosecuted. "Instead they're saying that, 'Back in 1999, we didn't investigate this case thoroughly enough. They stopped short of exonerating," she said. ![]() "The prosecutors today are not saying Adnan is innocent. Koenig records as Maryland State's Attorney for Baltimore Marilyn Mosby speaks to the media outside court on Monday. His case received widespread attention in 2014 when the debut season of Serial focused on Lee's killing and raised doubts about some of the evidence prosecutors had used. Syed, then 17, was convicted in 2000 of murdering his 18-year-old ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, in Baltimore, in January of the previous year. Because we've built a system that takes more than 20 years to self-correct. "So even on a day when the government publicly recognizes its own mistakes, it's hard to feel cheered about a triumph of 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," Koenig said in concluding the new episode. In a new episode of the Serial podcast released Tuesday, a day after Adnan Syed walked out of court following the vacating of his murder conviction, host Sarah Koenig noted that most or all of the evidence cited in prosecutors' motion to overturn the conviction was available since 1999. The creator of a true crime podcast that helped free a Maryland man imprisoned for two decades in a murder case said that she feels a mix of emotions over how long it took authorities to act on evidence that's long been available. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |