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The ruling was handed down Thursday in Baltimore by retired Judge Martin Welch, who had denied Syed’s previous requests for a new trial regarding the 1999 murder of his ex-girlfriend and fellow Woodland High School senior Hae Min Lee. In issuing the decision, Welch cited deficiencies in Syed’s legal defense as the reason for the new trial, saying his attorney, “rendered ineffective assistance when she failed to cross-examine the state’s expert regarding the reliability of cell tower location evidence.”

Thursday’s decision comes more than a year after Syed’s defense team launched an appeal process, an effort that gained momentum after the runaway success of Serial, the podcast that re-examined the official narrative of the crime, raising inconsistencies and sparking doubt in the minds of many listeners. Interestingly though, the information that prompted Judge Welch to invalidate the conviction was uncovered not in Serial but in Undisclosed, a spin-off podcast co-hosted by Syed’s family friend Rabia Chaudry.

Syed’s defense now has 30 days to file an appeal.

According to The Baltimore Sun, the state maintains belief in Syed’s guilt, as does Lee’s family who issued a statement saying, in part, “It remains hard to see so many run to defend someone who committed a horrible crime, who destroyed our family, who refuses to accept responsibility, when so few are willing to speak up for Hae.”

Supporters of Syed, meanwhile, expressed elation at the ruling. “We are just very happy. It’s not only a win for us but a win for a lot of people who are stuck in the system, because it opened a lot of people’s eyes about the justice system,” Syed’s brother, Yusuf, told The Sun.

While Judge Welch acknowledged the popularity of Serial, he said that it had no bearing on the decision as he had deliberately avoided listening to it.

“The court used its best efforts to address the merits of [Syed’s] petition for post-conviction relief like it would in any other case that comes before the court,” he said.

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In the briefing, Syed’s attorney, C. Justin Brown, asserts that Syed’s lawyer, M. Christina Gutierrez, failed to pursue evidence that could have resulted in Syed’s acquittal. Those who listened to Serial, the phenomenally popular true-crime podcast that detailed the initial investigation and trials of Syed, will recognize this overlooked evidence as the sworn alibi of Asia McLain, Syed’s acquaintance who says she was with Syed in the Woodlawn Public Library during the window of time the state believes the murder took place. As covered in the podcast, McLain wrote two letters to Syed after he was arrested for the murder of Lee in early 1999. In them, she volunteers an alibi for Syed. For unknown reasons, Gutierrez never pursued McLain as a defense witness. (Gutierrez died of a heart attack in 2003, two years after being disbarred.)

Today’s briefing further argues that Gutierrez ignored her client’s interest in a plea deal, telling Syed that a deal wasn’t an option, even though it has been established that Gutierrez never even approached prosecutors about a plea.

The Sun has a lengthy article on the intricacies of the appeal process here. One important legal point, noted in The Sun‘s piece, is that the brief is simply concerned with the competency of Gutierrez’s defense of Syed. It is not arguing to introduce new information unearthed during the 12-episode podcast or subsequent media interviews, such as the inconsistent memories of Jay Wilds, Syed’s school friend who admits to helping Syed bury Lee’s body in Leakin Park and who testified for the prosecution during the trial.

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In the affidavit, embedded below, McClain states that she was with Syed in the library from 2:30 to 2:40 p.m. on January 13, 1999, which is the window of time during which the state claims Lee was strangled. Syed, who is serving a life sentence plus 30 years in a Western Maryland prison has always maintained his innocence but his hazy recollection of the day of Lee’s murder and lack of corroborating evidence created suspicion, which was explored this fall in the phenomenally successful podcast, Serial. Indeed, Serial listeners will remember McClain from the first episode of the podcast in which host Sarah Koenig tracked her down and asked her about the day of the murder and her subsequent efforts to contact Syed.

In the affidavit, McClain states she was unaware of her importance to Syed’s case until the podcast brought it to her attention.

“After I learned about the podcast, I learned more about Koenig’s reporting, and more about the Syed case,” she says. “I was shocked by the testimony of [prosecutor] Kevin Urick and the podcast itself; however I came to understand my importance to the case. I realized I needed to step forward and make my story known to the court system.”

McClain maintains that she wrote two letters to Syed in March of 1999 reminding him of their interaction at the library on January 13. The letters were never used as evidence in the trial however. At the time, prosecutors, including Urick, said that McClain had withdrawn her testimony prior to the trial and had only given it in the first place because she had received pressure from the Syed family. In her new affidavit, McClain states that that is untrue, an assertion that suggests prosecutors suppressed evidence.

It is this angle that Syed’s counsel is now pursuing in the ongoing appeal process.

Stay tuned.

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The final episode of season one of
Serial—the runaway hit podcast from the makers of This American Life—was released today. And with it we come to the end of Sarah Koenig and company’s reinvestigation of the 1999 murder of Woodlawn High School senior Hae Min Lee—but are we any wiser for our 12-week submersion into the intricacies of the case?

To the surprise of exactly no one,
listeners have capital-“O” Opinions about this question, which, obviously, range, but today lean heavily toward the no-we-are-not-any-wiser end of the spectrum.

Today’s episode makes it difficult for me to say this, but I disagree: On the whole, I think, yes, this experience was valuable. Was it also frustrating, confusing, and uncomfortable at times? Oh yeah, but maybe, ultimately, that’s
why it was valuable.

So let’s address the obvious right now: From a listener’s standpoint, is it frustrating to have spent roughly 12 hours listening to a podcast only to have it end without the central mystery conclusively resolved? Yep. It is. I’m sure I’m not the first person to make this comparison, but it reminds me of how I felt at the end of
The X-Files or Lost. “Really?” I wanted to yell at my TV. “I invest this many hours of my life into this show and all you’ve got for me is ‘Mulder and Scully really love each other’ or ‘Everybody on the island is dead?’ GAH! NOT GOOD ENOUGH!” And that’s pretty much what I wanted to yell at Sarah Koenig this morning, too. “You put us through all that back and forth, you spend a year researching, you enlist so much professional help, and the best you’ve got for us is ‘Yeah, I’m kind of pretty sure that I think Adnan most likely didn’t do it’? Again I say: GAH! Why raise the question if you’re not going to answer it?

But that’s unfair. I think it’s important to remember that
Serial was an experiment. Serialized, non-fiction storytelling hadn’t been tried on radio in decades, if ever. And when the show launched in early October, it was to relatively little fanfare.
When we wrote about it the Monday after its debut, we had trouble finding media coverage of the premiere other than an article at Slate and an interview with WYPR. With such meager expectations, how could the Serial team possibly anticipate its status as a world-wide phenomenon, the most-downloaded podcast in history? How could they realize how much pressure they would be under to deliver a satisfying conclusion to a rabid audience? You can’t make plans for something like that, you can only react.

And they did. As today’s episode demonstrated, Koenig and co. were reporting right down to the wire. Would it have been great to talk to Don earlier in the series? Yep. Do I wish we’d had more time to investigate the note to Don found in Hae’s car? (Seriously, what was
that about?) Double yep. Do I wish Jay’s friend from the porn store had come forward sooner? Triple yep. But these are the vagaries you have to deal with in reporting any story. As much as you might want to, as much as you might understand that your story could benefit from it, you can’t make people talk to you. And, let’s be honest, part of the appeal of Serial was that it increasingly unfolded in real time. We, as an audience were at once outside and inside the narrative, observers and participants, pushing it forward and then standing back to examine the progress. I mean, last week’s episode, “Rumors,” was a direct response to accusations leveled at Adnan on the program’s Reddit message boards. If that’s not audience participation, I don’t know what is—and that’s an intoxicating position to be in.

So, yes, to put the brakes on now, just when it seems like there is finally some forward momentum in the case, is infuriating.
Adnan’s appeal hearing is coming up in January, and I think we all want to know the results of the DNA tests the police are finally going to run. Can’t they at least do a follow-up special? Why are we turning back now, when an organic ending is in sight?

But while I found the ending unsatisfying and the season uneven, I am willing to cut the
Serial gang a little slack. This season was their test run. I believe they will use what they’ve learned this year to fashion an even better season 2, which—unless they are idiots, and I doubt they are—will include a blockbuster ending.

Quibbles aside, I would absolutely recommend season 1 of
Serial to anyone because of its complexity. More than any program I can think of right now (television or otherwise), Serial encourages ambiguity and debate. Aside from the central question of whether or not Adnan is guilty, it raises myriad questions about the nature of truth and narrative and human behavior, which are fascinating.

As frustrating as it can be, I appreciate
Serial‘s aversion to easy answers. There is something innate in us which craves certainty, probably because, on some fundamental level, we recognize that there is no such thing. And so, when Sarah Koenig vacillates for the umpteenth time, we fume and squirm not because we are certain, but because we recognize her doubt as our own. It is an uncomfortable but healthy reminder that life is complicated and mysterious, and the mechanisms we use to understand it—data collection, personal intuition, narrative—are imperfect.

The major thorny issue though is that we’re here at all, talking about it, writing about it, debating its artistic merits. There is something inherently ghoulish and unseemly about our collective fascination with the true-crime genre, which, by definition, takes real (often grisly) events and shapes them into narratives fit for our reading, viewing, or listening pleasure. On some level, we
enjoy stories like this the same way we enjoy horror movies. We are both terrified and morbidly fascinated. We cover our eyes and then peek through our fingers. Which is all fine when we’re talking about fictional people, but Hae was a real young girl who was strangled and then buried in a shallow grave, and Adnan is a real young man who may have spent the last 15 years of his life in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, and Woodlawn is a real community that suffered a tragic loss. So if we have trouble reconciling the amount of fun we’ve had discussing the podcast with the amount of tragedy that initially inspired it—well good, maybe that’s the point.

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Just two months later, the podcast that is reinvestigating a 15-year-old murder case in Woodlawn has been downloaded on iTunes more than 5 million times and the story is now taking its most dramatic turn.

Lawyers for Adnan Syed confirm that an appeal hearing has been set for January to see if he qualifies for post-conviction relief. Syed has been in prison since 1999 for the murder of his ex-girlfriend, and Woodlawn High School classmate, Hae Min Lee. 

Though the podcast’s popularity is unprecedented, the timing of this appeals case is merely a coincidence as Syed’s legal team has been working for years to prove his innocence.

“I joke that when I was hired to do Adnan’s appeal I was a free-wheeling single man and now I’m married with two kids. It’s been a lengthy process,” Syed’s lawyer, C. Justin Brown, told the Associated Press. “There are three parts to the legal process: a trial, then an appeal, then you have post-conviction relief. This is the last step.”

Brown’s appeal does make similar points to what Serial host Sarah Koenig has been expounding on for nine episodes. Namely, there were no eyewitnesses tying Syed to the crime and there was a flawed defense strategy on the part of Syed’s former attorney, Christina Gutierrez. Brown said that Gutierrez knew about Syed’s classmate Asia McClain, who saw him in the library during the time prosecutors claim Lee was killed, but never pursued this lead that would have given Syed an alibi.

“The entire trial depended on whether Syed could prove where he was at the time of the murder,” Brown wrote. “Meanwhile, a credible witness—an honors student who had no obvious bias in favor of Syed—had come forward unsolicited with a recollection that she had been with Syed around the time of the murder . . . Yet the lawyer did absolutely nothing.”

Before the podcast aired, the Maryland Court of Special Appeals asked prosecutors to respond to the post-conviction appeal to see if they too believed Syed had ineffective counsel. Now, the judges will make the ultimate decision in January.

“It’s an unusual phenomenon,” Brown said. “The Court of Special Appeals has shown some interest in the case and asked the state to respond to our application, which is more than they usually do in this procedural posture. But I truly think the appellate courts make their decisions based on the merits of the case, and not the popularity of a podcast.”

As with anything popular, there has been a backlash (and a backlash against the backlash) surrounding Serial, but this news reiterates that it’s more than just speculative theories or Reddit threads: a real person was killed, a real person is in prison, and a real court will ultimately decide his fate.

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