Adnan Syed Granted a Retrial, ‘He’s Not Convicted Anymore.’

Adnan Syed Granted a Retrial, ‘He’s Not Convicted Anymore.’ June 30, 2016

Adnan Syed - photo courtesy of Rabia Chaudry's Split the Moon site.
Adnan Syed – photo courtesy of Rabia Chaudry’s Split the Moon site.

From one of the first blog posts Rabia Chaudry wrote about her childhood friend, Adnan Syed:

For 15 years I’ve believed Adnan as he’s held on to his innocence. It has been a drawn out trauma for those of us who know and love Adnan. I’ve run around with his case files for years, sometimes in the trunk of my car, sometimes storing them at my mothers, sometimes at Adnan’s parents. I held on to them through a bad marriage, divorce, single parenthood, remarriage, moving, and moving, and moving. I read them, forgot them, revisited them, forgot things again. Over 5 years, then 10, then 15 many details faded, but a few remained rock solid. Parts of his trial, the visits to him, the appeals, the people involved in the case – it was snips of a movie. Watching him grow from a skinny teenager with sparse facial hair to a big, broad man in prison was like a movie. But it wasn’t a movie. It was his life.

Today, Adnan Syed has been granted a new trial by Baltimore City Courts. Call it a Ramadan miracle. Call it what you want. I call it a combination of divine guidance plus the never ending, day-and-night dedicated hard work of Rabia first and a dedicated team alongside her.

According to The Daily Beast:

Adnan Syed, the subject of the Serial podcast, has been granted a retrial, his attorney announced Thursday on Twitter. His conviction was also thrown out. Syed was found guilty for the 1999 murder of his high school girlfriend, Hae Min Lee and sentenced to life in prison in 2000. They were both students at Woodlawn High School in Baltimore at the time. Syed’s case was the subject of the 2014 inaugural season of the Serial podcast, which outlined potential holes in the prosecution’s case against Syed and questioned the adequacy of his legal counsel.

To watch the trajectory of this story has been to witness and be taught lessons in dedication, sorrow, heartbreak, perserverence and all-out, never ending belief in the innocence of one man. I had the immense fortune of becoming friends with Rabia when she joined Patheos Muslim, first as a columnist for Altmuslim and later as the host of her own blog, Split the Moon, where she wrote on issues of justice, Islam, marriage, divorce, immigration and later chronicled the episodes of Serial, which first turned the world’s attention on Adnan’s case (after Rabia sent the case to them and urged them to investigate this story in their first season).

As Serial took off, she moved from Patheos to her own independent site and worked every angle possible to keep the world’s attention on Adnan and Serial, amassing a global following in the millions of supporters who urged her and the team on in their fight for justice. It’s been a masterful fight, with no stone left unturned. Together with lead investigator Justin Brown and lawyers Susan Simpson and Colin Miller, who joined Rabia on the Undisclosed podcast, they dug into the weeds of the case and investigate everything that Serial hadn’t.

Indeed, it was dedicated work of Susan (along with Rabia and Colin) on the cell phone towers records (among other things) that led Judge Welch to call for a retrial, said Brown in this press conference.

It’s not for nothing that this amazing news came out today, on the 25th fast of Ramadan, a month where Muslims the world over are bent in prayer and fasting, making du’a for whatever they are yearning for. I’m sure the prayers for Adnan were as strong as ever this month. And God listened. And, inshAllah He will bring this case to a close, freedom for Adnan and true justice for Hae Min Lee.

Said Brown at the press conference: “As of this day, [Adnan’s] conviction is gone. He is not convicted anymore.”

Let that sink in.

Alhamdullilah.


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