Treatment of Serial's Adnan Syed is a National Shame

On Monday, a Maryland judge overturned Adnan Syed’s first-degree murder conviction for the 1999 death of his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee. He exited the Baltimore courthouse to deafening cheers from a large crowd gathered outside. The 41-year-old is free for the first time since he was sentenced to life in prison at the age of 17, a saga memorably recounted by the smash-hit podcast Serial.

The case against Syed hinged on the testimony of his friend Jay Wilds, who told the jury that Syed showed him Lee’s body after placing it in the trunk of a car and enlisting his aid in helping dispose of it in a neighborhood park. But Wilds, who was given a lawyer by the prosecution and never charged, made statements that varied over time and with respect to key details. Crucial to corroborating Wilds’s shifting, incentivized account were cell-phone records that purportedly proved that Syed received calls in the park area around the time that he claimed they were burying Lee. Twenty-three years later, prosecutors now concede that their case against Syed was little more than smoke and mirrors. Worse, they had cheated in their zeal to win, burying key evidence.

If Syed’s freedom is cause for celebration, it is also cause for shame. He was not released because the American criminal justice system is fair. He was released despite its brokenness and corruption. For years, he remained in prison despite the worldwide attention brought by Serial and the relentless efforts of a core group of stubborn advocates. In the end, it took a random and quirky turn of events to unshackle him.

Again and again, judges and prosecutors in a position to undo Syed’s wrongful conviction doubled and tripled down to cement it, deploying procedural roadblocks, imposing exacting evidentiary standards, and failing to meaningfully review the evidence. This innocence-denying bureaucracy, supercharged by incompetence and indifference to the truth, doomed his repeated attempts to be exonerated. Disturbingly, nothing that happened in Syed’s case — including the gamesmanship — is particularly unusual. He is the 23rd Baltimore man to have his murder conviction thrown out because of official misconduct. Nationwide, police and prosecutor rule-breaking contributed to 72 percent of those falsely convicted of murder. As Professor Daniel Medwed explains in his new book, Barred: Why the Innocent Can’t Get Out Of Prison, “the system values finality and efficiency over accuracy.” He explains, “It’s about power and control. It’s about the ways in which those at the top keep those at the bottom from moving up.”

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/09/exoneration-of-serials-adnan-syed-is-a-national-shame.html